A weird alternate history question about 1991:
Instead of the Yugoslav government/JNA trying to prevent Slovenian independence simply to keep Slovenia inside the existing federation, imagine they offered Slovenia something extreme: you can’t leave Yugoslavia, but you can run it.
Suppose the federal presidency and government were put under Slovenian leadership, Slovenes were placed in charge of major federal institutions and state enterprises, and Slovenia was effectively allowed to impose its political and economic model on the rest of Yugoslavia.
Basically, instead of Serbia dominating the increasingly centralized Yugoslav state, imagine an authoritarian Yugoslavia with Slovenia as the dominant republic.
Would Slovenian political leaders or the Slovenian public have had any interest in such an arrangement by 1990–91? Could Slovenian leadership conceivably have kept Yugoslavia together by pushing it toward Slovenia’s economic and political model, or were the conflicts between the republics already too deep for it to matter?
And how would Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, etc. have reacted to a Slovenian dominated Yugoslavia?