Slovenes: “a nation of owners of one of the three original European languages?”

The Slovene national movement of the late nineteenth century was based primarily on the myth of an eternal linguistic community, an essentialist position within historiography. The national development itself best fits into patterns described by Hroch and Gellner. Although most objective conditions for national constitution were met by 1929, it is not clear if subjective ones had been met by that time. World War II revitalized the nation-constitution process, particularly by warring Communist- and Catholic-supported political and military factions, both claiming to fight for a Slovene identity, while Communists also claimed to be fighting for a “Greater” (Megali) Slovenia. With the war’s end, and Slovenia becoming a Yugoslav republic and expanding geographically, there was no doubt of a Slovene national identity, as understood by Connor, among the general population. However, important developments followed in nation-constitution after 1945, particularly upon gaining independence in 1991. The process need not be considered completed. Slovenes may be considered leaning towards a cultural type nation, with a cultural nucleus in an essentialist understanding of the Slovene language.     

Do street traders have the ‘right to the city’? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg,post-Operation Clean Sweep

Street trader organisations are paradoxical objects of study. Their claims resist being analysed through the ‘right to the city’ lens, so contested are rights to inner city spaces between multiple users, not all of them in dominant socioeconomic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader, oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, an entrepreneurial identity. In the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (in which the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict street traders from its inner city), this paper unpacks the politics of street trader organisations: how they organise their constituencies, frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter into disempowering conflicts in engagements with a divisive municipality.     

An American Perestroika in Dutch Cities? Urban Policy in the Netherlands at the End of a Millennium

This paper discusses the implications of the recent adoption of interactive forms of governance in Dutch urban policy. Advocates of this new approach claim that interactive governance will have positive effects for (1) the quality of urban democracy and urban governability and (2) for the solution of the information problems inherent in coping with (wicked) urban problems. On the basis of an extensive evaluation of the implementation of the new policies in four of the 25 Dutch municipalities involved, these claims are critically assessed.