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The Croatian popular party, the navy, and pragmatic „cosmopolitanism“ in Croatian- and German-language newspaper texts in Pula (1904-1910)

As the main port of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Pula (now in the Croatian part of the Istrian peninsula) became a culturally very mixed and multilingual city. The dominant language groups were Italian (mainly the bourgeoisie and part of the working class), German (a multicultural group consisting of employees of the navy and state institutions who formed the highest social classes) and Slavic (particularly Croatian and Slovenian, languages mainly spoken by lower strata, such as workers and peasants). In a complex political situation marked by growing Italian and Slavic national movements and conflicts and a central imperial power trying to maintain stability and control, a very important role in shaping public discourse was played by the daily press, which was ideologically close to some of the main local political actors (the Italian national-liberal party, with an increasingly nationalist and Irredentist agenda, the navy, representing the central imperial power, and the Croatian popular party). In spite of the clear political agendas pursued by these newspapers and explicitly related to the (often adversarially construed) interests of particular nationally defined groups, pragmatic attitudes often encouraged a „cosmopolitan“ acceptance of and mutually beneficial relations with national, political and social Others. A discourse of respectful multicultural co-existence was of course the only officially sanctioned one, but it was also particularly important to the navy (for obvious reasons) and to the Croatian party, which sought to establish itself and the „ethnically Croatian“ population as a factor to be reckoned with in local politics. This paper will focus on examples of this discourse and the different pragmatic considerations involved, as well as the mutual construction of these two groups and their („actual“ and desired) relations, based on discourse analysis of Croatian- and German-language texts in daily newspapers in Pula roughly in the period 1904-1910.

Austro-Hungarian Empire ; Pula ; newspapers ; discourse analysis ; national discourse ; pragmatic cosmopolitanism ; German ; Croatian

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