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Adriatic Forum: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2011

Pamela Ballinger
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Extract

At first glance, the three essays that make up this forum dedicated to the Adriatic appear to chart a fairly standard course for scholarship on the region, depicting the area as one transected by conflict and contest or, alternatively, as a site of cultural mixing and coexistence. The reader quickly realizes, however, that all three authors offer innovative analyses that challenge, even as they build on, the body of work exploring the political and cultural contours of the Adriatic in the modern era. Much of this scholarship reiterates a reductive view of the Adriatic that sees it principally through the narrow prism of competing Italian and Slavic nationalist claims. Although Dominique Reill, Igor Tchoukarine, and Borut Klabjan address Italo-(South)Slav tensions and dialogues, they locate them in much broader frameworks that oblige the reader to rethink understandings of both the contents of these nationalisms and the contexts within which they developed. In different ways, for example, these papers highlight a seemingly obvious but little explored fact: The object of so much contestation and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just land, but also the sea that lapped the shores of the Adriatic territories.

Type
Forum: A Contested Adriatic
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 42 , April 2011 , pp. 56 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2011

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References

1 In this, the literature of the Adriatic follows trends well established for the larger Mediterranean. For a useful discussion of the competing “polyphonic” and “cacophonic” models associated, respectively, with the metaphors of bridge and wall, see Bromberger, Christian, “Bridge, Wall, Mirror: Coexistence and Confrontations in the Mediterranean World,” History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007): 291–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Herzfeld, Michael, “Segmentation and Politics in the European Nation-state,” in Other Histories, ed. Hastrup, Kirsten (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; also Herzfeld, Michael, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar. For the classic anthropological exposition on segmentary identity, Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940)Google Scholar. Refer also to the useful discussion in Cassia, Paul Sant, “Identity, Nationalism, and Anthropologists,” in Between Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Cassia, Paul Sant (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 This question no doubt remains implicit within Tchoukarine's text, given his work elsewhere on tourism under Socialist Yugoslavia. Consider his piece, among others, in Grandits, Hannes and Taylor, Karin, eds., Yugoslavia's Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s) (Budapest, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the idea of an “Adriatic for all” promoted through domestic tourism after 1945: Duda, Igor, “Adriatic for All: Summer Holidays in Croatia,” in Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, ed. Luthar, Breda and Pušnik, Maruša (Washington, DC, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 Reill, Dominique Kirchner, From Bridge to Border: Adriatic Multi-nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, 2011)Google Scholar.

5 Furthermore, the type of imperial entities involved here proves important. In his comparison of the “Scramble for Africa” to that for the Adriatic, for example, Klabjan (this issue) risks conflating the distinct politics of European territorial empires with those of overseas expansion and colonization. Although the differences may not be as great as imagined (as Klabjan provocatively suggests), further detail is required in order to demonstrate both the similarities and the differences in the imperial grabs for territory in Africa and the Adriatic. Perhaps a more apposite comparison with the Adriatic situation analyzed by Klabjan—particularly his discussion of Czech and other desires to secure the region as a space for economic interests—would be with the colonial paradigms advanced in Italy in the period between 1890 and World War I. Notions of “ethnographic colonies” competed with those of “territorial colonies.” In the imagination of men like Luigi Einaudi, Italy could attain much greater prestige and economic greatness through emigrant settlements abroad (i.e., the Diaspora) than by establishing formal colonies through imperial expansion and war. Did the Czech proposals for influence in the Adriatic and especially Trieste envision something along the lines of what Einaudi, invoking Italy's medieval past in contradistinction to a Roman imperial heritage, called the “merchant prince?” On this, see Choate, Mark, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar.

6 For more details, Ballinger, Pamela, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 For a review of some recent publications on Trieste, see Ballinger, Pamela, “Imperial Nostalgia: Mythologizing Habsburg Trieste,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 1 (2003): 84–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Admittedly, Tchoukarine does stress how the unitarist Yugoslavism of the Adriatic Guard made for the establishment of circles even among non-Slavic Yugoslavs, such as the Kosovar Albanians.

9 Matvejević, Predrag, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. Heim, Michael Henry (Berkeley, 1999), 14Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 69.

11 On the problematic status of the “Adriatic Orientation,” see Rihtman-Augustin, Dunja, “A Croatian Controversy: Mediterranean-Danube-Balkans,” Narodna umjetnost 36, no. 1 (1999)Google Scholar.

12 Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, 207–11.

13 Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 By contrast, Adria or Adriana does not appear to be a widely popular name in Italy. This may reflect the fact that the Adriatic competes with Italy's other seas for prominence and visibility. Or it may point to the deeper issue that the sea in general has occupied an ambivalent and even marginal role in Italian national identity. On this, Frascani, Paolo, Il Mare: L'Identità italiana [The Sea: Italian Identity] (Bologna, 2008)Google Scholar. Also, Frascani, Paolo and Armieri, Marco, eds. A Vela e a vapore: Economie, culture e instituzioni del mare nell'Italia dell'Ottocento [From Sail to Steam: Maritime Economies, Cultures, and Institutions in 19th Century Italy] (Rome, 2001)Google Scholar.

15 Steinberg, Philip, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001), 61Google Scholar.

16 Theutenberg, Bo Johnson, “Mare Clausum et Mare Liberum,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984)Google Scholar.

17 Gillis, John R., Islands of the Mind (New York, 2004), 85Google Scholar.

18 For one account of how the symbolic geographies of coastal/interior, urban/rural continue to play out in contemporary contests over the upper Adriatic, refer to Ballinger, Pamela, “Lines in the Water, Peoples on the Map: Maritime Museums and the Representation of Cultural Boundaries in the Upper Adriatic,” Narodna umjetnost 43, no. 1 (2006)Google Scholar.

19 Astengo, Corradino, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I, ed. Woodward, David, (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar; Tolias, George, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century,” The History of Cartography: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I, ed. Woodward, David (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar. The predominance of Venice as a center for such cartographic traditions may help explain something that Reill notes in passing: Other European powers, as well as Venetians themselves, continued to depict Venice as the center of the Adriatic even after Venice had entered into terminal decline.

20 Ethnographers of the First Yugoslavia tended to focus on key boundaries within the South Slav area to the relative neglect of the Latinized/Italianized populations on the coast. Cultural geographer Jovan Cvijić (one of the founders of the Department of Ethnology in Belgrade), for example, included both Istria and Trieste as part of a Balkan cultural space. Baskar, Bojan, “Made in Trieste: Geopolitical Fears of an Istrianist Discourse on the Mediterranean,” Narodna umjetnost 36, no. 1 (1999), 122Google Scholar. See also Bosković, Aleksandar, “Anthropology in Unlikely Places: Yugoslav Ethnology Between the Past and the Future,” in Other People's Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the Margins, ed. Bosković, Aleksandar (New York, 2008), 158Google Scholar.

21 Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, 10.