Smiling Slovenia: Political Dissent Papers

Smiling Slovenia's collection of articles and essays on Slovenia's current political scene boldly declares its dissenting view from the political mainstream beginning with a declaration of a dozen prominent intellectuals presenting their views of Slovenia's political situation. Topics range from recent Slovenian history, Slovenia's role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, foreign policies, including liaisons with the Islamic terrorists to modern-day Slovenian-American relations and Slovenia's admission into the European Union. This book shows that Slovenia, although outwardly westernized, is still deeply rooted in its communistic legacy. However, prominent intellectuals and democratic politicians strive to hold Slovenia to the highest European cultural, ethical, political, legal, and economical standards in public life - a goal that may take several generations to achieve. Some authors observe that transparency achieved by the present conservative coalition government has already established a state of affairs where return to the old ways of a crypto government would be impossible even if the leftist parties returned to power.

The Editor: Vladislav Bevc received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and Air Force Office of Scientific Research at Oxford University, St. Catherine’s College, England. He has conducted scientific research in the defense and aerospace industry and taught electrical engineering as Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and as a part-time lecturer at the University of Southern California and San Francisco State University. He was a senior staff member at the California Public Utilities Commission and a consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as well as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Bevc is the author of papers on applied physics and a contributor to the Reinhold Encyclopedia of Electronics and The Wiley Encyclopedia of Environmental Pollution and Cleanup. He is the author of Liberal Forces in 20th-Century Yugoslavia (Lang, 2007) as well as of papers and book reviews on Yugoslav politics that have been published in The South Slav Journal and Canadian Review of Nationalism .