Authors

Discussion

Jure Gašparič, Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič, Tjaša Konovšek, David Bordon

Parliament in the Age of Europeanisation - Parliament Debating the Past? 

This paper explores narratives about the past in Slovenia since independence in 1991 to the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, focusing especially on the war. It analyzes the relationship between the vocabulary and narratives of the War of Independence in 1991 and those of the Second World War, examining how the two have been mutually referenced or contrasted within parliamentary speeches. We argue that the War of Independence frequently served as a conceptual framework through which the meaning of the Second World War was reframed and recontextualized and adopted to contemporary issues. Within the same spatial, yet distinct temporal setting, the political uses of war have undergone significant transformation. By tracing overlaps, divergences, and temporal transformations in the language used (via corpus linguistics), the chapter aims to show how, when and why the interpretations of the Second World War remained dynamic and closely tied to contemporary political struggles of the 1990’s.