The article is based on the argument that the Carniolan sausage (kranjska klobasa) played an important role in the formation and development of Slovenian national awareness in the period between the ...Spring of Nations and the end of World War I. The Carniolan sausage was an integral part of a unified field of exchanges which enabled the collective recognition of the members of the nation. The article then discusses its place in 'banal nationalism' - the daily nationalism that slips from our attention and daily reminds people of their nationality. As a banal national symbol, highlighting national differences and significance, the Carniolan sausage was a constant reminder of the nation. In the last part, the article analyses its role in 'nationalism from below', or everyday nationhood - the reproduction of nationhood by ordinary people in everyday life. The Carniolan sausage demonstrates that nationalism is not merely the result of a political programme or ideology, but primarily a network or collection of people, objects, practices, places, institutions, ideologies, technologies, ideas, symbols etc. which define the subjectivity of the people, and form their actions and imagination.
The radical break between two national contexts in 1991, when Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia, and Slovenia’s integration into the European Union in 2004, has brought changes to the collective ...memory of the Slovenian nation. In this article, I investigate how Delo, a major Slovenian daily newspaper, has been involved in memory struggles to present new memorial discourses that are in accordance with the new national politics. A large part of the common Yugoslav past has been reinvented for the present political and ideological purposes of European integration, whereby the Second World War and the Partisan movement, which once signified a common Yugoslav life, have become a contested issue. The focus of the critical narrative analysis is put on those general narrative templates that underlie specific news narratives about the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia. Over the last 25 years, dominant media have strengthened memory struggles in the Slovenian public realm and have created revisionist narratives of the Second World War and the post-war past.
