Diego D'Amelio, Andrea Di Michele, Giorgio Mezzalira, eds. La difesa dell'italianità: L'Ufficio per le zone di confine a Bolzano, Trento e Trieste (1945-1954). Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015. 604 pp. 42.00 EUR (cloth), ISBN 978-88-15-25142-8.
Reviewed by Fabio Capano (American University)
Published on H-Italy (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Matteo Pretelli (University of Naples "L'Orientale")
The Office of the Border Zones: A Political History of Italy’s Contested Borders
Many studies of Italy’s contested sovereignty on its borders post-1945 have focused on its diplomatic dimensions and have highlighted the role of national elites in negotiating the unfavorable terms of the peace treaty. These studies have reinforced the depiction of a weak republic that passively accepted the “external diktat” imposed by the winning powers. This edited volume reshapes the historical narrative of Italy’s political strategy toward its contested borders by studying the Italian government’s politics of identity toward the populations living on its northern and eastern borders. In so doing, it unveils the juxtaposing realities between liberal, fascist, and republican Italy. By focusing on the activity of the Office of the Border Zones (hereafter UZC), the authors use a number of original sources to prove that the Italian government and a wide network of political actors restlessly pursued the reassertion of national sovereignty on its contested frontiers in order to promote a cohesive idea of nation in the context of postwar reconstruction.
The volume is organized in two parts that are introduced by a short preface written by Andrea Di Michele. Di Michele briefly summarizes the trajectory of what could be considered the precursor of the UZC, “The Central Office for the New Provinces” (p. 28), which coped with the reality of ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous areas on Italy’s borders starting in 1915. In his essay, he highlights the changes imposed by the Fascist regime during its quest for cultural homogenization. This prelude provides the reader the historical background needed to better understand the UZC as an essential element of Italian national political culture rather than an aberration of the new republic. Finally, Di Michele investigates the dynamic nature of the political relationship between Rome, Bolzano, and Trieste by studying the evolution of the UZC and the diplomatic changes that greatly influenced the South Tyrol and Trieste questions.
The first section of the book studies the northern border: the Trentino and the Alto Adige regions. The first few chapters focus on the political process that led to the De Gasperi-Gruber agreement of 1946 by stressing Rome’s firm opposition to any options for self-determination. In line with former governmental policies that firmly debunked the autonomous ambitions of the political voice of the German-speaking population in South Tyrol, Südtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrolean People’s Party, SVP), such authors as Luigi De Blanco prove that the republican elites remained firmly committed to “the defense of Italianess” (p. 100). For years, Italian territorial claims were part of the nationalist rhetoric and were associated with the collective memory of local collaborationism with the Third Reich. These connections further reinforced the publicly constructed idea of a “barbaric invasion” from the local German-speaking population. In the context of the Cold War, Allies’ favorable attitudes toward the new Italian Republic facilitated Italian territorial mires and led to the signature of an autonomous statute whose terms and concessions only partially mediated popular distrust toward the new Italian administration. However, changes in Cold War politics and memories of Italian brutality against the German minority, such as the 1953 “death marches” (p. 125), ultimately reprised the South Tyrol questions in the mid-1950s. From this perspective, Gunther Pallaver’s chapter on border identity examines the tension between the political center (Rome) and the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of its periphery (Bolzano) to prove that political parties became bearers of irreconcilable group identities that were rooted within years of Fascism and war. Changes in international politics ultimately forced these political parties to reframe the narrative of the border dispute in political and economic terms rather than through the lens of ethnicity, a process that locally led to ample political autonomy.
While these first few chapters focus on the intersection between international politics and border identity, the following ones investigate the multifaceted nuances of Rome’s strategy toward the local German communities through the lenses of the UZC and its predecessors. Giorgio Mezzalira examines the legacy of the memory of fascistization within the local public in South Tyrol and the aftermath of state-sponsored Italian immigration after 1945. He unveils continuities with Fascist practices in such areas as housing, employment, and repression of local expressions of German irredentism. However, his essay also highlights the complex and politicized nature of local Italian immigration to ultimately debunk the idea of a governmental plan aiming to ethnically reconfigure South Tyrol and facilitate a second Italianization. This theme is further explored by Di Michele who undertakes an in-depth study of the role that special border offices played in pursuing a sort of “bonifica umana” or human reclamation starting with Fascism (p. 180). Di Michele studies the “Ente tre Venezie” (the predecessor of the UZC) and its role in containing German irredentism, facilitating German emigration toward the Third Reich, and reallocating land and property to the Italian group in the immediate postwar years. Likewise, Stefan Lechner’s chapter on the postponed de-Nazification of the German-speaking minority of the region further analyzes the Italian government’s policy toward local German speakers. The author demonstrates that the Italian government’s denial of Italian citizenship for those who had opted for German citizenship in 1939 not only marked continuities with former Fascist practices but also, and more importantly, undermined German speakers’ ambitions for self-determination.
This theme is central to the last few chapters of this first section that explore state-led strategy of Italianization in a local context that was dominated by ambitions for political autonomy. Carlo Romero’s chapter investigates the Italian government’s propaganda of “Italianità” by highlighting the massive financial and political support that, especially after 1954, the central government provided to the local Italian ecclesiastical network and moderate German intellectuals to weaken the growth of political extremisms and local violence. Lorenzo Gardumi’s essay studies the sociocultural landscape of Rome’s policies toward the region and shows that the central government’s diffidence toward the local “trentini” was dictated by their historical allegiance to the Habsburg monarchy and broad support for political autonomy in the immediate postwar years. In a rural region that was highly influenced by Catholic sentiments, anti-Italian feelings and secessionist ambitions remained strong and were closely scrutinized by the UZC. This tension between Rome’s territorial ambitions and the strength of a local border identity is further explored by Maurizio Cau. In studying the historical process that accompanied the redrawing of the northern frontier and further exacerbated the complex coexistence between minorities harboring ambitions for either self-government or secession, Cau proves the fiction of an imagined community that unfitted its local context.
The second part of the volume also begins with a study of the political and diplomatic process that accompanied the second border dispute: the Trieste question. Massimo Bucarelli emphasizes the ethno-political and ideological dimension of the Adriatic rivalry and highlights the instrumental role that the Trieste question played within the broader scheme of the Cold War and the containment of Communism. In discussing the key turning points that shaped the frontier dispute, Bucarelli emphasizes the shifting political interests that affected Italian-Yugoslav relations and portrays well the leading motifs that forced both countries to overcome years of mutual distrust and disagreements. To unveil the complexity of political normalization, Anna Maria Vinci explores the sociocultural background that underscored the mythology of the nation across Italy’s eastern border. Vinci studies the historical role of the periphery in the narration of ideas of nationhood to demonstrate the lingering tension between the democratic rhetoric of the postwar Italian Republic and the strength of nationalist discourse within the Adriatic space. She shows that the defense of the border’s Italianess politically rehabilitated Far-Right movements that, while benefiting from institutional and popular support, polluted patriotic rhetoric and promoted political violence within and beyond the contested frontier. Joze Pirjevec’s chapter complements well Vinci’s study and approaches the border’s identity from the Slovene perspective. This study dates Slovene identity back to the Napoleonic years and highlights its conflicting relationship with regional powers, such as the Habsburg Empire or other competing nationalisms, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While discussing the “fascist cultural genocide” and the fractured nature of the anti-Fascist Slav movement, Pirjevec investigates Slovene territorial ambitions over Trieste and its role in fueling the postwar violence that crossed the border (p. 363).
These first few chapters introduce the reader to the complexity of frontier identity and effectively set the stage for the following essays that focus on the specific role played by the UZC to reassert the border’s contested Italianess. Diego D’Amelio’s chapter explores the city’s instrumental role in furthering the conflicting narrative of Italian civilization versus Slav “barbarism” and the political role of the UZC in supporting the local anti-Communist movement and Italian paramilitary network as the ultimate bastion against the Communist and independent front (p. 396). Anna Millo’s work further examines the UZC strategy toward the disputed border and unveils the connections between secret services, state, and Far-Right political extremism from the early years of the Cold War to the mid-1950s. Through an accurate study of Italian and Allied archival sources, Millo reveals the nature and scope of state-sponsored covert actions in Trieste and reasserts the Italian government’s responsibility in the spread of local political violence. Similarly, Nevenka Troha’s chapter approaches ethno-political violence from the Slovene perspective. Troha’s work analyzes the political and territorial ambitions of the Slovene Liberation Movement as well as Belgrade’s financial, military, and political support for the pro-Yugoslav leftist network in Trieste. In particular, it emphasizes its conflicting relationship with local pro-Italian groups and the Allied authorities.
The politics of identity that fueled local antagonisms between Italian and Slovene minorities in Trieste is the central theme of the last few conclusive chapters. Peter Karlsen demonstrates the pivotal role that UZC played in shaping the Italian government’s aggressive strategy toward the local Slovene minority, the Titoist network, and the local independent movement. These groups, which were perceived as a direct threat to Italian territorial goals toward the city, became the main political targets of the pro-Italian front. This front is the object of Irene Bolzon’s chapter, which studies Italian political parties, groups, media, associations, and Rome’s financial support to what was perceived as a bastion of local resistance to Slav-Communism. From this perspective, Roberto Spazzali’s chapter examines in-depth the reallocation process for the émigrés from the areas under Yugoslav control to broaden the reader’s understanding of the mass exodus, its public ramifications, and, above all, its sociopolitical, financial, and symbolic meaning.
In the concluding remarks, D’Amelio summarizes well the UZC’s strategy toward both borders by highlighting the complex and transforming nature of the political relationship between the center and the periphery of the nation as well as the legacy of Fascism on the process of democratization and nation-building in postwar Italy. The volume unveils similarities and differences between two border regions that continued to share sentiments of political localism yet greatly differed in experiencing nationalist rhetoric after 1945. These two regions witnessed the revamping of Slav or German irredentism in response to a centrally led politics of identity that, publicly referring to the experience of irredentism and the myth of the Great War, relaunched the idea of a cohesive nation that fell victim to an externally imposed “diktat.” From this perspective, the UZC, its personnel, and transforming political strategy become a privileged window into Italian politics and its adventurist ambitions, best exemplified by the “last bloody page” of Trieste’s 1953 riots (p. 573).
The volume succeeds in demonstrating the importance of ethno-politics and its ramifications, yet the process leading to the demise of national patriotism and the rise of political localism is only partially explored through the chapters. Moreover, Rome’s reading of the contested frontiers through the lenses of ethnicity and ideology is a central and fascinating theme of this volume but the analysis of its transforming nature and legacy on postwar ideas of nationhood is not fully developed. Finally, in narrating the story of a special office that operated behind the scenes of Italian politics, what remains unclear is the role that people’s sentiments played in these local communities to support political momentum to the idea of a bridge border or “confine ponte” (p. 591). Despite these observations, this edited volume brings together Italian, German, and Slovene scholars and provides further momentum to the fascinating and dynamic field of border studies. Although the general public would certainly benefit from this objective narration of two of the most highly politicized pages in Italian history the scholarly nature of the volume, its multiple themes, and the richness of its archival sources makes it a must-read for any scholar of modern Italy with an interest in national patriotism, legacy of Fascism, and borderland regions. More broadly, this volume encourages scholars from different fields to pursue comparative and innovative projects to best investigate twentieth-century nation-building and regime transition in postwar Europe and beyond.
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Citation:
Fabio Capano. Review of D'Amelio, Diego; Andrea Di Michele; Giorgio Mezzalira; eds., La difesa dell'italianità: L'Ufficio per le zone di confine a Bolzano, Trento e Trieste (1945-1954).
H-Italy, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52538
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