Border regions and identity

Abstract

This article examines a number of models for the formation of spatial, ‘geo-political’ and ‘geo-cultural’ identities that have emerged since the publication of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, and asks how effectively these approaches can be applied to border regions. The article focuses on two contrasting case studies: French Flanders, and the Adriatic port of Trieste and its immediate hinterland. The first is a region located by a relatively stable border on the edge of a ‘historic nation’; the second, until the end of the First World War, was part of a multi-national empire, located at a point where several different cultures and ethnicities met, mingled and, on occasion, violently clashed. Analysis of the contrasting experience of identity formation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trieste and French Flanders serves not only to highlight both the value and the limitations of various theoretical approaches, but also to emphasise the surprising degree to which peripheral regions can play a pivotal part in shaping the identity of the centre.

Keywords:

• border regions
• frontiers
• identity
• spatial identity
• Trieste
• French Flanders
• Habsburg Empire
• France
• Italy
• Eugen Weber
• Benedict Anderson
• Peter Sahlins

Acknowledgements

Timothy Baycroft wishes to thank the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales for their support in the preparation of this research.

Notes

 1. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. For a good example of the continued significance attached to Weber's model, see, for example, the conference held in UCLA in December 2006: ‘Rethinking Eugene Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen: acculturation, integration and difference in Modern Europe’.

 2. On more general theories of nationalism, see Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Breuilly, Nationalism and the State; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Greenfeld, Nationalism; Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood; , Nations and nationalism since 1780; idem and Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition; Smith, National Identity; Teich and Porter, eds, The National Question in Europe in Historical Context; and Baycroft and Hewitson, eds, What is a Nation?

 3. See, for example: Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor; Sahlins, Boundaries; Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France.

 4. For a fuller discussion of the problems of borders, see Donnan and Wilson, Borders; id., eds, Border Approaches; O'Dowd and Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States, and Power and Standen, “Introduction”, 1–31.

 5. See Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism.

 6. See Baycroft, “Changing identities in the Franco-Belgian Borderland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.”

 7. Rusinow, Italy's Austrian Heritage 1919–1946. Glenda Sluga has elaborated an elegant critique of essentially diplomatic historians such as Rusinow who ‘tend to validate the motivations of political groups and intellectuals who affirm cultural assumptions of Italian and Slav differences, and the cultural and political antipathy between them’. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border, 172. The key targets of Sluga, besides Rusinow, are: Duroselle, Le conflit de Trieste 1943–1954; Novak, Trieste: 1941–1954, and Rabel, Between East and West.

 8. On Trieste's minorities, see Millo, L'élite del potere a Trieste, 25–68.

 9. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

10. For an example of ways in which scholarship has sought increasingly to identify ways in which communities might be imagined beyond and in parallel to the national, see Donnan and Wilson, Borders, 156. Anderson himself was always aware that the nation was by no means the sole community of the imagination. See, for example, his discussion of the significance of pilgrimage for the imagination of religious communities. Ibid. (rev. ed.), 54–5.

11. Ibid., 163–85.

12. Slataper, Il mio Carso, 1–2. On Slataper's role as a writer of Trieste, see Ara and Magris, Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera, 6–16, 62–3.

13. Cited ibid., 62.

14. Looten, Le Comité Flamand de France 1853 à 1903.

15. Blanchard, La Flandre, 399–401.

16. Baycroft, “Changing identities.”

17. It is noteworthy that Anderson's work has been increasingly critiqued, whether for its allegedly excessive emphasis on print culture, its focus on the nation rather than region (or other forms of community), or its choice of examples. For an interesting example of scholars both building on and challenging Anderson, see Castro-Klarén and Chasten, eds, Beyond Imagined Communities.

18. It is worth observing here that for the inhabitants of Trieste itself, given the relatively small size of the city, and of the territorial scope of its immediate hinterland, it was to a degree possible to know as well as to imagine the community to which one belonged. Obviously one could not know all the inhabitants, but the educated elites at least were generally aware of who was who within Triestine society.

19. This is not to say that Anderson is unaware of the local or the regional – see, for example, his discussion of the impact of Russification policies on Baltic Germans or on the relationship of Scottish to the English language and British crown – but that his focus is invariably drawn from this to the nation as the principal arena of research. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 87–90.

20. ‘We are talking about the process of acculturation: the civilization of the French by urban France, the disintegration of local cultures by modernity and their absorption into the dominant civilization of Paris and the schools. Left largely to their own devices until their promotion to citizenship, the unassimilated rural masses had to be integrated into the dominant culture as they had been integrated into an administrative entity. What happened was akin to colonization, and may be easier to understand if one bears that in mind.’ Weber, Peasants, 486.

21. For more on the local economic conditions, see Ardoin-Dumazet, Voyage en France and Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism, 65–73.

22. Baycroft, “Changing identities.”

23. Dewachter, “Le Recul du Flamand dans le Nord de la France depuis 1806,” 89–98.

24. See for example Chaussois, Géants du Nord/Pas-de-Calais; Millon, La Ballade des Géants de la Flandre maritime française, and Gueusquin, Fêtes, géants et carnavales du Nord–Pas-de-Calais.

25. See Logie, “Grens en sociale relaties: huwelijkskringen als voorbeeld van de sociale invloed van staats grenzen,”, and Verhasselt et al. , “Espace géographique et formes de sociabilité: quatre exemples de régions frontalières.”

26. For more on the question of chronology see Baycroft, “Peasants Into Frenchmen?”.

27. For example, the loss of free port status in 1891. Millo, L'élite, 21. It is noteworthy that the abolition of the free port, while a central decision, was implemented for reasons of local as much imperial welfare. Trieste's elites were generally unconvinced by the arguments put forward by Vienna for such a reform.

28. Millo, “Trieste, 1830–1870”.

29. Millo, “Trieste,” 72. The removal of free port status (for perfectly sound economic reasons) in 1891 also antagonised some Italian-speaking Triestini, although the expansion of the port itself between 1901 and 1914 and the opening of rail links with Baveria in 1906 provided some compensation. See Millo, L'élite, 13. Babudieri, Industrie, commerci e navigazione a Trieste dall'inizio del Settecento ai primi anni del Novecento, 151–89.

30. Millo, L'élite, 28.

31. Rusinow, Italy's Austrian Heritage, 9; Ara and Magris, Trieste, 65. On Gayda, see Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 27.

32. For examples of a rather optimistic view of Habsburg modernisation in the last 50 years of the Empire's existence, see Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 and Komlos, The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union.

33. The Mazzinian rhetoric of Wilsonian self-determination, which in theory underpinned the Paris Peace Settlements, was never systematically applied. It served instead as a crude legitimising ideology to justify the terms imposed on the defeated powers. Italy's annexation of the South Tyrol, Istria and the lands around Trieste was based simply on negotiation between the victorious powers, and never on any serious consideration of either the ethnic/linguistic composition of the regions or on historical allegiances.

34. Nitti was also anxious about possibly alienating the newly created Yugoslavia, with which Italy had far from cordial relations.

35. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 40–3.

36. Fascism was more ambivalent about the construction of a single uniform national culture than is generally acknowledged. For Fascist sympathies for regional diversity, as embodied in the strapaese movement, see Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Some policies do fit more neatly with the Weber model, such as the 1938 establishment of the new University of Trieste, which Bruno Coceani – he had Italianised his original surname, Coceancig – declared symbolised the ‘spiritual defence of the border and of the cultural expansion of our race’. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 55.

37. On the fundamental problems militating against the creation of a widespread and popular Italian culture in the decades after unification, see Laven, “Italy”.

38. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 48–50. Paradoxically, the local Fascists who most energetically supported the forced assimilation of the Slavs went by the distinctly non-Italian names of Fulvio Suvich and Bruno Coceancig.

39. Wilson, “Sovereignty, identity and borders.”

40. Ibid., 204.

41. Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France.

42. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor. For a persuasive discussion of the close relationship between modernism and the local, see Hüppauf and Umbach, “Vernacular Modernism.”

43. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity.”

44. Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France.

45. For examples of regional culture, see Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism, 36–44.

46. See for example, Tiersot, Histoire de la Chanson Popluaire en France, 32–3, 91–3, 127–30, 241.

47. Boulanger's electoral poster ‘Leve Vraqnkryck! Leve het Vaderland!’ L'Indicateur de l'arrondissement d'Hazebrouck (August 14, 1888), full-page supplement.

48. For a full discussion of cultural appropriation, see Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism, esp. 114–15.

49. For example, Millo, L'élite, 52 speaks of the pride with which members of the minority communities welcomed ennoblement into the Habsburg aristocracy.

50. It is important to remember that tensions that are sometimes seen as ethnic also sometimes reflected class antagonisms. Useful works on political and social developments in Trieste in this period include: , La formazione del proletario urbano; id., “‘Organisierter Konflickt” und “Direkte Aktion”’.

51. Ara and Magris, Trieste, 78.

52. Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 55.

53. Ballinger, History in Exile. Curiously those Italians who remained in Istria – the so-called rimasti – often from the same families as those who fled, were traditionally content to stress their status as Yugoslav Italians within the brotherhood of Yugoslav nationalities.

54. Billig, Banal Nationalism.

55. On the conflict between these two ideas of Trieste see Negrelli, Al di qua del mito, and Ara, “The ‘Cultural Soul’ and the ‘Merchant Soul’”, 58–67, 59–60.

56. Sluga, The problem, 143.

57. The Alto Adige also receives subsidies from Austria and even Bavaria. Thus it is precisely by refusing to adopt a clearly Italian identity that the region retains its advantageous economic position. This, of course, was not the case under the Fascists. The different responses of the centralising French state, and the Italian state based on far greater tolerance towards potentially separatist regions, as enshrined in the Republic's constitution, reflects very different postwar traditions in the two countries. On the less centralised nature of postwar Italy, see Foot, Modern Italy, 103–9.

58. Sahlins, Boundaries.

59. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 135–7.

60. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 127.

61. Stella, “Il commune di Trieste”, 499–681, 667–70.

62. Ara, “The ‘Cultural Soul’ and the ‘Merchant Soul’”, 62.

63. Ballinger, History in Exile.

64. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 207.

65. For a fuller discussion of hybrid identities see the special issue on ‘Practices of Hybridity’, Paragraph 18 (1995), especially Mireille Rosello, “Introduction”, 1–12.

66. In addition to the above, see for example Young, Colonial Desire, Werbner and Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity and Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation and Class.

67. Berger, “Border Regions, Hybridity, and National Identity: The Cases of Alsace and Masuria,” 366–81.

68. Ara, “The ‘Cultural Soul’ and the ‘Merchant Soul’”, 60.

69. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Preface to the 2005 Routledge Classic Edition, xiii.

70. Stuparich, Trieste nei miei riccordi, 18–19.

71. Cited in Sluga, The Problem of Trieste, 161.