Page 17 - Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2017. Glasbene migracije: stičišče evropske glasbene raznolikosti - Musical Migrations: Crossroads of European Musical Diversity. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 1
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foreword

Such questions of national identity are becoming increasingly topical
in today's Europe, which is facing a completely different form of migration.
In conditions which saw, in the autumn of 2015, Slovenia's border crossed
by upwards of 10,000 migrants a day, diametrically opposed views conta-
ining elements of nationalism on the one hand and an idealisation of mi-
grant and refugee issues on the other hand began to gain in strength even
here. In the face of a common European policy that is frequently devoid of
ideas, Europe's much vaunted solidarity proved itself once again to be more
or less bogged down in the red tape of Brussels bureaucrats. In this complex
security policy situation, in which the crisis of the ideals of a united Euro-
pe is contrasted, in parts of the continent, by the growing selfishness of na-
tional policies, the barbed wire fences that until recently served to separate
the developed part of Europe from its undeveloped part have proved to be
significantly more real. And so at a time of renewed political and ideologi-
cal divisions between individual European countries, when old grudges are
once again emerging and harmful patterns of behaviour by extremist gro-
ups are gaining in strength, all synergies – in other words everything that
has connected us for centuries – come to seem all the more important.

May I end this introduction by thanking all the authors who have con-
tributed and, above all, the outgoing Editor of the proceedings of the Slo-
vene Music Days, Emeritus Professor Primož Kuret, for his three decades
of tireless work as the head of the International Musicological Symposium.
We can only hope that we are able to continue to work at something like the
same tempo and with a similarly far-reaching vision to that of the founders
of the Slovene Music Days more than three decades ago.

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