Slovenian Privatization & Human Rights in the Dominant Ideology

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Sergej Flere, "Human Rights and the Ideology of Capitalist
Globalization: A View from Slovenia," _Monthly Review_ 52.8 (January
2001)

...Human Rights in the Dominant Ideology

Human rights are no mere fad, lacking content and history. They
contain universal, all-embracing ideas with great allure. In
political discourse and life, however, they seem to be flexible
enough to be invoked in the most varied of situations. The concept of
human rights is now used as a political tool in the legitimation of
highly diverse political acts on the part of the ruling actors on
national and world stages. Civilian targets in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia,
can be bombed; Iraqi children deprived of essential foods and
medicines by embargo; murderous South American military figures can
be arrested (like Pinochet) or alternatively supported with billions
of dollars and advanced weaponry (as in Colombia); and all justified
with human rights talk. In the contemporary dominant ideology, human
rights are understood almost exclusively as classical political
rights (free speech, assembly, universal suffrage, etc.), while
rights of a social nature, such as the right to health and welfare or
the right to work, are ever less stressed or stressed only in the
spirit of lip service, as was the case at the aborted Seattle World
Trade Organization meetings. Shifts in "universal" and "timeless"
rights are particularly informative. For much of the Cold War,
refugees from "communist tyranny" were given honorary treatment. Now
that refugees come to the developed parts of the world in greater
numbers, citizenship and residence take on much greater importance as
a precondition for the enjoyment of supposedly universal human
rights. The movement of masses from the underdeveloped countries of
the Third World is curtailed, and by force. This, of course, is the
way capitalism works. Human rights are limited to legal residents, to
political rights, and they are abstracted from their social,
economic, and cultural setting and context.

The present dominant ideology in the world is doubtless heir to the
ideology of the "free world." "Free world" served as the code phrase
for underscoring the absence (or at least shortage) of individual
political liberties in the communist world. Any anticommunist
dictatorship belonged to the "free world," as long as it entertained
an anticommunist posture. The only criterion it needed to meet was to
join the ranks of the struggle against "International Communism" (the
code word to underline the supposedly expansionist, imperialistic
intentions and objectives of the communists). The "free world" idea
has exhausted its utility with the demolition of the USSR, along with
the "free world's" bloody baggage of Suhartos and Pinochets. The best
way to examine the real outlines of the emerging new human rights
model is to observe its operation in practice. I have had the
opportunity to observe from up close an instructive instance: the
privatization of social property in my homeland of Slovenia.

Slovenian Privatization

Slovenia borders Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia and in the last
decade became, for the first time, an independent country. It has a
population of about two million, in a fertile and often scenic,
wooded, hilly, and mountainous territory of some eight thousand
square miles, roughly comparable in size to Wales or New Hampshire.
It had been the most economically advanced republic of the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), just as previously it had been
the least economically developed province of the Austrian part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Slovenian per capita gross domestic product
is about at the level of Portugal or the Czech Republic; i.e. it is,
with the Czech Republic, the most prosperous and developed of all the
previously "really existing socialist" states of central and eastern
Europe.

In Slovenia, the end of the 1980s was marked by a call for the
implementation and protection of human rights. The campaign spread
from among the intellectuals throughout the entire population. The
emancipation and transition process was heralded and spearheaded by a
civic Committee for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights (the
Bavcar Committee). Sentiment for national independence was not marked
by ethnic mythology, but by aspiration for the broadest possible
actualization of human rights. A state organized around the idea of
human rights implementation and protection was to be the culmination
of the dream of an independent Slovenia. On December 23, 1990, the
Slovenian Assembly solemnly declared that "pursuant to the fact that
the SFRY no longer functions as a legal state and that human rights
in it are grossly violated, the Republic of Slovenia (declares itself
to be) an emancipated and independent state."

What were the actual consequences of this declaration of independence
and introduction of pluralist democracy? They were certainly numerous
and radical. These changes were not without consequences outside
Slovenia, particularly in the former SFRY lands. We will bypass this
complicated issue and take a look at the way privatization was
carried out in Slovenia and particularly at the banner under which
this "denationalization" (restitution of public property to its
former private owners) was carried out after "democratic changes" at
the beginning of the nineties.

Capitalism was reimposed in Slovenia above all through the
restitution of private property to former owners, as imposed by the
Law on Denationalization adopted in 1991. The legislation was adopted
with great speed, after the first democratic elections" in the
Republic of Slovenia- although the issue had not been the subject of
the elections. The legislation was prepared by a small number of
people, without much public debate. There is no serious question but
that the vast majority of the Slovene public at the time was opposed
to restitution in kind, except that pertaining to arable land, i.e.,
which would be returned to peasants. The economic consequences of
denationalization and privatization were kept out of the picture
publicly presented. As the present Rector of the University of
Ljubljana and the then- vice-president of the Slovenian government,
puts it today: "Privatization was not at all an economic issue, but
purely a political one. It was an issue of how to destroy socialism,
i.e., communism, quickly."

In the euphoria of political democratization, against the background
of the bloody conflict taking place in the rest of the former
Yugoslavia, a vast redistribution of wealth took place largely
outside public notice and without popular consent. According to some
estimates, in a small country of some two million inhabitants a total
of twenty-five billion dollars was redistributed, primarily through
restitution to private owners. This restitution was carried out
mostly in kind. I am speaking here of property which had become
publicly owned (setting aside the niceties of the former Yugoslav
concept of self-management, which held that property was "socially
owned" and had become "non-ownership") by a wide array of legal
instruments after the end of the Second World War. These 1991
restitutions reinstated not only mostly capitalist modes of ownership
but even feudal ones: the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, is
becoming the owner of considerable arable land and of huge forests.
Part of the property taken by the post-Second World War Tito regime
had been to the direct benefit of the actual peasant cultivators of
the land. Even these measures were subject to restitution by the
democratically elected regime in 1991. Those entitled to restitution
were no more than sixty thousand people among two million. The arable
land and forests were assessed at 20 percent of the total .

The beneficiaries of restitution were in no way entitled to it on the
basis of their work, which may be considered a nearly universal
ethical basis of ownership, nor was it taken into account that half a
century of social effort had preserved property that would have
surely been bankrupted or otherwise attenuated or eliminated under
capitalist scenarios. How could this have been legitimized? A minor
justification was found in the affirmation of the greater economic
efficiency of private ownership, though this argument ceased to be
used when economists began to question it seriously during the rapid
economic contraction that marked the first five years of national
independence. During the criticism of really existing socialism in
the 1980s, the supposed economic efficiency of private property and
inefficiency of public property were generally held as truisms. But
the reality of the early 1990s ended that. The major justification,
though, was thinly veiled. It purported to be a correction of
injustices carried out by the former Communist regime. This was the
official explanation contained in the draft Law on Denationalization,
as well as in statements of the democratic political parties and
groups (the Slovene Christian Democrats and the Democratic Opposition
of Slovenia [DEMOS]).

These injustices were held to have arisen from the denial of private
property as a sacrosanct and inalienable human right. It was
implicitly considered that private ownership was the highest value
among human rights and that it should therefore be restituted
completely and in kind, regardless of any other considerations. A
further analysis would uncover the efficacious action of a small
lobby linked to the then-dominant "democratic" political parties. In
the implementation of the denationalization, it became unclear
whether and how to compensate the Roman Catholic Church as to a
certain portion of forests (due to numerous changes of ownership and
other rights during the recent centuries). The Roman Catholic Church
in Slovenia, by way of its bodies (bishoprics, etc.), legitimized its
entitlements by invoking its "human rights," supposedly violated by
the Slovenian state, and threatened to take the matter to the
European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This, in spite of the
Catholic Church's own hideous record and legacy concerning human
liberty and freedom of conscience, the difficulty of finding the
Church to be more entitled to human rights than a democratic
government, and the Christian doctrine that extols charity. But if
human rights talk is effective for purposes of property litigation,
then with pious mien it shall be deployed.

Human rights have become a universal sacred canopy, potentially
legitimizing any act convenient for the reproduction of the existing
world distribution of power and wealth. These rights are always
promoted by ruling groups in a narrow political sense, without taking
into consideration economic and welfare rights, a deeper relationship
between human rights and justice, and particularly without
considering the social preconditions for the affirmation of human
dignity by way of a legal instrument such as human rights. The
individual with her human rights is set free. Free, that is, to
compete on the labor, financial, and every other kind of environment
organized as a market.

Human Dignity

The concept of human rights, and the national and international legal
instruments that protect them, are not without potential for the
improvement of the human condition. But human rights as a legal
instrument are implemented and realized within certain finite,
social, economic, and cultural circumstances that determine the
conditions of their meaning for human dignity. Absent successful
struggle to change those conditions for the better, human rights talk
is but cruel mockery. Public property may lead to one distortion in
the realization of human rights, primarily if it leads to
bureaucratization and its evils. On the other hand, huge disparities
and inequalities of a social nature in private property represent a
fundamental limitation in the achievement and use of human rights
(not to speak of human dignity). It may even represent a denial of
the existence and use of human rights. Therefore, the idea of
individual and collective human rights is a limited one at best. On
inspection, it proves no better than any other ideological
instrument, in spite of the rich international and domestic legal
protection mechanisms it extends. The existing domestic and
international instruments of legal protection of human rights may
have little to offer to those thrown to the wolves in the arena of
market exploitation, where full employment is becoming ever more rare
and welfare protection measures are being dismantled. It is necessary
to draw attention to double standards in the application and
enforcement of human rights and to the fact that these double
standards are not accidental, but part and parcel of ideological
discourse.

We face this moment today in Slovenia, where the European Union
objects, and therefore places obstacles in the way of our future
entry, that sufficient inequality has not been achieved. And this
outrageous proposition is justified by human rights talk. But we then
have the opportunity to make clear to our fellow citizens the
one-sided, false, ideological nature of this way of presenting the
ultimate issues. The meaning of human rights as a concept in
political discourse has passed from an emancipatory stage to one
where it legitimates the existing global order and, at best, partly
limits the use and abuse of political power.

SERGEJ FLERE is professor of sociology at the University of Maribor,
Slovenia. He specializes in sociology of religion and ethnicity and
has written widely on sociological questions, including an essay
entitled "Explaining Ethnic Antagonism in Yugoslavia" (European
Sociological Review, March 1991). He also served on the Council of
the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.

[The full article is available at <http://www.monthlyreview.org/101flere.htm>.]