EUROPE NOW! (or at Least by 1992)

While particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, socialist Yugoslavia maintained close contact with the neighbouring European Economic Community, its most important foreign trade partner at the time, this did not preclude Yugoslavia’s non-aligned foreign policy. Based on newly accessible documents from the federal foreign affairs authorities, the first part of the paper analyses Belgrade’s official position vis-a-vis Brussels in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Namely, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which reduced Yugoslavia’s geopolitical relevance, and the growing wariness of the European commissioners with regard to its complicated internal affairs situation, the prospect of Yugoslavia attaining associate or even full membership in the European Economic Community – aspirations particularly promoted by the reform government of Ante Marković – proved unrealistic. In the northernmost Yugoslav republic, which was also most actively engaged in an economic exchange with the European Economic Community, frustration over sluggish negotiations on the part of federal authorities with Brussels and especially the comprehensive integration process introduced in the European Economic Community by the Single European Act prompted an autonomous search for new paths to the emerging largest global economic bloc. The second part of the article draws on materials of republican provenance to provide an analysis of the imaginary of Europeanism, as well as of the technocratic strategies adopted to approximate the Slovenian/Yugoslav legislation and standards (the so-called 1990 White Paper), which was a major focus of the last Slovenian socialist government and the reforming League of Communists. Although the catchphrase of the time, “Europe Now!”, was interpreted in some parts of Yugoslavia as a call for Slovenia to immediately and independently join the European Economic Community, the Slovenian late-socialist establishment still allowed for the possibility of Slovenia integrating into Europe within the framework of Yugoslavia.