Slovenia Between Liberalization and -- Democratization?

During the visit to Yugoslavia, March 14-19, 1988, by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, The Washington Post of March 15, wrote: "(Gorbachev] is also to visit the (northwestern] Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, where a liberal local regime has developed a radical model of political pluralism under communism." A follow-up report in the same newspaper of March 17, the day Gorbachev was in Slovenia, said that "the Soviet leader asked to visit Slovenia because of its status as a Communist-ruled region that is most advanced in economic development and political liberalization. " On the same day The New York Times correspodent wrote from Ljubljana: "Hard-working Slovenia ... has often marched to a different drumbeat than most of Yugoslavia, wielding the tools of economic restructuring to pursue its own development and interests ... its Communist leaders have opened up the intellectual debate to a wider degree than is evident elsewhere in the country." Such reports naturally provoke the question: What kind of "political pluralism" did Gorbachev find in Slovenia? There is a broad consensus among foreign observers that since the death in 1980 of Yugoslavia's President-for-life Josip Broz-Tito, developments in Slovenia have indeed evolved more and further than in other republics of multinational Yugoslavia. Sometimes one even gets the impression that Slovenia is on the verge of independence and ready for transition to democratic rule. Calling in its title Slovene dissidents "The Champions of Glasnost", an editorial in The Economist of March 19, 1988 asked: "Are there any taboos left in Slovenia?" There is no doubt that, at its roots, the difference between Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia has to do with Slovenia's ethnic homogeneity as well as its cultural and economic affinity and proximity to the West as a sort of mini-Europe in the geographic center of the old continent on "the sunny side of the Alps". However, even in Slovenia political and economic evolution has not reached as far as readers of the above and similar reports may have inferred. Misunderstandings stem from the failure to distinguish between two related but quite different evolutionary concepts: liberalization vs. democratization. Liberalization, in reference to today's Communist regimes, means different things in different countries, but these differences are all to be found in the following categories: greater assertion of policy differences within the ruling Communist Party, limited recognition of human and civil rights to the citizens and, at its most liberal, toleration of various dissident phenomena. Within these categories liberalization is expansible or reversible by decisions of the Communist Party leadership. The Slovene Communist Party (League of Communists) has permitted liberalization in Slovenia to expand farther than it has in other republics of Yugoslavia. Glasnost (with perestroika) is Gorbachev's (not yet fully clarified) version and extent of "liberalization" for the Soviet Union. In no case has liberalization affected the political monopoly of the ruling Communist party. The concept of democratization, on the other hand, extends, as the etymological meaning of the word suggests, essentially beyond liberalization. It involves legalization of organized political opposition with a view to making possible equal participation of all the people in the electoral processes of periodically selecting a country's government and