During a recent holiday in London, I found myself thinking about Slovenia. It happened as I walked through the city, from Westminster to Soho, from the City to the neighbourhoods further east, among people of different languages and skin colours sharing the same streets and shops. I caught myself wondering what a 'traditional' Brit would even look like, and London offers no easy answer. Britain was once an imperial power, and the movement of people between Britain and its former colonies is one of the forces that helped shape modern Britain. Sometimes history is simply walking past you on the street.
The same is true at home. In 2025, foreign citizens represented 10.1 per cent of Slovenia's population, and 81.9 per cent of them came from the countries of the former Yugoslavia. This migration did not suddenly appear at Slovenia's borders. For decades, people moved within what was then one country, where they studied and worked together, married one another, and built families. After Yugoslavia dissolved, the borders changed, but the people did not become strangers to one another.
Today, many people whose parents or grandparents came from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, or Kosovo were born in Slovenia. Others arrived as adults and have spent decades here. They work in Slovenian companies and pay taxes, and their children attend Slovenian kindergartens and schools. Some of them speak Slovenian with an accent and some without one, some have Slovenian citizenship and others do not, yet we still often talk about them as if they were temporary guests.
"Go back where you came from." "We don't need you here." "Slovenians are better." You can find these phrases in everyday conversations, online comments, schools, and public debates.
We are perfectly comfortable with their presence when they are working, and happy to celebrate them when they succeed. Some of Slovenia's most recognisable athletes, actors, entrepreneurs, and public figures have roots in the former Yugoslavia, and their success is readily claimed as Slovenian success.
But somewhere between being useful and being celebrated, many people are still treated as outsiders. They may have lived here for years and still struggle to obtain citizenship. They may speak Slovenian but still be marked by their surname or accent. Their children become targets of stereotypes and bullying.
Slovenia has Balkan restaurants, shops, and cafés, and people sometimes point to them as evidence that these communities are already free to preserve their culture. But having a Bosnian restaurant does not mean that a Bosnian child feels equally accepted at school, and being able to speak your mother tongue at home does not mean that your voice carries the same weight in public discussion.
"Somewhere between being useful and being celebrated, many people are still treated as outsiders."
Manca Frank, student associate at ISR
There is nothing wrong with communities maintaining their culture. The question is why we so often expect minorities to prove that they are integrating and so rarely ask ourselves whether we are allowing them to belong. Learn Slovenian, find a job, understand our customs, adapt. Integration is usually presented as a newcomer's responsibility, but it is also the process through which a society makes room for people who are already becoming part of it.
Yugoslavia is still visible in our workplaces and schools, our sports teams and our families, and yet we continue to divide people into 'us' and 'them' as though history stopped at the border. The question we should ask ourselves is not who gets to be one of us. It is why, after all these years, we are still so determined to decide who is not.