Naslov
From the Last Bastions of Italianity on the Easternmost Border of the Homeland: Divergences among Italian-speakers in Post-Imperial Fiume and Liburnia

Autori
Jeličić, Ivan

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Adjustment, adaptation, adoption? The reconfiguration of ethnicities during the post-WWI transition in East Central Europe. 3rd conference of the ERC NEPOSTRANS research project, co- organized with the Archives of the City of Budapest

Mjesto i datum
Budimpešta, Mađarska, 03.11.2021. - 04.11.2021

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
Post-imperial transition ; Ethnicity ; Regionalism ; Fiume/Rijeka ; Liburnia

Sažetak
Following the collapse of Austro-Hungarian imperial institutions in November 1918, the Italian army occupied the former Austrian Littoral. The mostly non-Italian population on the northeastern Istrian shores, a region known as Liburnia, was hardly supportive of the Kingdom of Italy’s territorial claims. Still, this diplomatic objective was ultimately achieved with the Treaty of Rapallo at the end of 1920. However, the experience of transition among the more Italian- enthusiastic population of Fiume—the former corpus separatum of the Kingdom of Hungary—was more intricate. After back-to-back occupations of the city by Interallied forces and D’Annunzio’s troops, and following its short-lived existence as a contested free-state, the Kingdom of Italy’s annexation of Fiume was accomplished only at the beginning of 1924. Local political elites—and the Italian nation-state—presented, promoted, and cherished an image of these territories and its people as genuinely Italian. Yet, beneath the façade of a unified Italianity, disagreements and frictions were not uncommon among Italian-speakers from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italians from the Kingdom of Italy. The aim of this presentation is to investigate ethnic dissonances and tensions among Italian-speakers in Fiume and Liburnia, unraveling the differences and similarities between former Austrian and Hungarian territories. In the first part, I plan to display how Fiume’s specific administrative position within the former Kingdom of Hungary—matched by a modern regional political-civic movement in the late Habsburg period—was exploited by immediate post-war political actors. Fiume’s Italian- speaking regionalism, catalyzed by international and local vicissitudes, and transformed through independentism, was a lively form of groupness that challenged Italian nationalism. My second focus will be Liburnia, an area lacking both a regionalist movement and Italian nationalists. In Liburnia, annexation to Italy was not contested by scattered Italian nationalists. Rather, animosities arose due to the modalities of policies perceived to be in favor of or against the local Italian and non-Italian populations. The northeastern Istrian case shows which elements of pre-war categories of identification persisted, which of them changed, and how ethnicity was interpreted, deployed, and advocated for achieving personal goals.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Povijest

POVEZANOST RADA