Originally Published: 2004-08-22

On May 1, Slovenia, Malta, and Cyprus joined the European Union with seven other countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland).
Slovenia's luck is that of being an outsider. Slovenia (capital: Ljubljana) has been entertaining relations with Italy since ancient times.
Not only because in the first century C.E. it became a province of the Roman Empire, but also because it remained, ever since in the area of influence of Aquileia, one of the most populous and strategically located cities of the Empire. It remained just as strategic even in later years (despite the repeated devastation wrought first by Attila and then the Lombards); it lent its name to the Friulian Patriarchy (known as 'Patriarchy of Aquileia'), one of the most solid and durable political-religious structures of the second millennium.
The Patriarchy reached out to Klagenfurt in Austria and Ljubljana in Slovenia, so Italians from Friuli, Austrians, and Slovenians always developed close relations among them, including trade, cultural, and linguistic. In this territory, a sort of transnational region, the three souls of Europe - the Latin, the Germanic, and the Slavic - merged. Traces of this merging are everywhere, in architecture, customs, idioms, ideas, even food.
That's why for Slovenia, even more than the other new members, joining the EU is a homecoming. In the recent past, rigid borders and even more rigid ideological barriers were keeping it aside, but Slovenians, Italians of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Austrians of Kärnten never stopped their dialogue, even across those barriers.
After being ruled in turn by the Bavarians, Franks and Magyars, the Slovenians were annexed to the Habsburg lands and slowly Germanized. When Charles V divided the Empire in 1521, Slovenia was incorporated in Austria, and it remained a part of Austria until 1809, when Napoleon included it in the Illyric Provinces he created following his victories over the Empires of Central Europe. When Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna (1814) returned Slovenia to the Habsburg, under whose rule the country remained until 1918, when the Empire was dissolved following World War I. From then on, Slovenia gravitated in the Yugoslavian area. After the war, in fact, a national convention in Zagreb proclaimed the union of the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro with the lands of Croatia and Slovenia, formerly part of the Austrian Empire. The new state, which from 1929 took the name of Yugoslavia, assumed the form of a constitutional monarchy under the Serbian dynasty of the Karageorgevic.

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