To browse Academia. In analysing the continuing endurance of the 10 October celebrations, the discussion focuses on a number of cultural responses which provide a strong critique of the predominant nationalist use of the plebiscite and offer literary impetus for a more tolerant and productive intercultural exchange in Carinthia.
The plebiscite was on the question of whether southern Carinthia should join the rump state of the former Habsburg monarchy, German-Austria, or the newly created SHS. In , the majority of the resident population both the German Carinthians and the Slovenian minority decided in favor of Austria. In the following decades an unrelenting struggle for language and memory was waged by German-nationalist-minded representatives of the German Carinthian majority against the minority.
Treatises and Documents, Journal for Ethnic Studies, The article, a revised version of a lecture given at the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljub-ljana, discusses the domestic and international dimensions of minority politics in post-Nazi Carinthia. Based on archival research in Britain, Austria and Slovenia Yugoslavia it argues that despite Austria's transition from National Socialist rule to postwar democracy there was evidence of a basic continuity in the stigmatisation and self-stig-matisation of the Slovene minority.
This continuity largely explains why Carinthian politics moved in an increasingly anti-Slovene direction in the s, leading in to the demolition of the bilingual school system which had been introduced in The international dimension, Yugoslavia's territorial claim, the policies of the West and the Cold War are also discussed but the article argues that they were secondary to the dynamics of provincial politics. The article presents the political participation of the Slovene minority in Carinthia from the plebiscite of until the present.
The changed electoral franchise agreed by the ruling parties in Carinthia in the s blocked attempts of the minority to be incorporated adequately in a broader political sphere. The political actors of the minority followed two strategies: one of building up their own political structures in local parties and one of joining Austrian and Carinthian mainstream parties.
