Atfirst 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.Footnote 1 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.
All too frequently, in studies of contests to “appropriate Adria” (to use Klabjan's felicitous phrase), the Adriatic itself is assumed or taken for granted, while its particular properties as a sea space remain uninvestigated. Nor is there much examination of how those making claims on and about the Adriatic conceptualized it specifically as a watery realm. These three essays illustrate the cluster of economic, political, and affective concerns that made the Adriatic so central to those powers and peoples whose territories bounded it. The studies by Klabjan and Tchoukarine also demonstrate the perceived import of the Adriatic for states and populations not immediately proximate to the sea. In his essay, for example, Klabjan examines the ways in which Italian and South Slav interests in the sea competed and intersected with those of land-locked states, notably Czechoslovakia and Hungary, whose leaders considered themselves heirs of the Habsburg Empire and hence entitled to access to its maritime outlets. In addition, countries possessed of northern seacoasts quite distant from the Mediterranean—such as Germany and Poland—also nurtured hopes of retaining influence in the former Habsburg maritime realm. Klabjan stresses in particular the strong economic presence of Czech firms in Adriatic port-cities, particularly Trieste, from the later decades of the nineteenth century. After the empire's dissolution, members of the Czechoslovak Trieste Board of Maritime Affairs proposed “that Czechoslovak citizens, as former Austro-Hungarian citizens, should retain certain rights to coastal navigation, fishing, and the extraction of raw materials or to pursue enterprises connected with the sea in which the Czech nationalists had actively invested their capital” (Klabjan). Yet some Czechs, at least, had also invested more than money in the sea. The very spas and baths noted by Klabjan or the Český Yacht-Klub established in Trieste in the late Habsburg era likely created emotional attachments to the sea(side) for those (elite) Czechs who had the opportunities to experience it viscerally.
The issue of such affective ties to the Adriatic emerges more explicitly in Tchoukarine's contribution. Tchoukarine explores the aims, initiatives, and ultimate limitations of Jadranska Straža (Adriatic Guard), an association founded in Yugoslavia in 1922 with the explicit goal of fostering a pan-Yugoslav “consciousness and love toward the Adriatic Sea.” The Adriatic Guard's ultimate goal was no less than “to transform Yugoslavia into a sea-oriented nation.” Although concerned with defending Yugoslavia and its waters against Italian irredentist claims to mare nostrum, the Adriatic Guard devoted just as much energy to bridging cultural, political, and geographic divides within royal Yugoslavia. In particular, proponents of the organization sought to link those Yugoslavs who lived far from the Adriatic's shores to the sea, both in material and symbolic terms.
Although the organization's campaign to promote a sense of ownership of the sea (naše more) among Yugoslavs evidences an indissoluble nexus of economic, political, and cultural interests in the Adriatic, Tchoukarine stresses that it was the political that dominated the Adriatic Guard's agenda. Indeed, editors of the association's journal “were not pleased with articles that only indirectly touched upon politics—i.e., culture or tourism.” This may explain, in part, the limitations of this Adriaticism and its ultimate failure as an explicit program for both political solidarity and economic development within the first Yugoslavia. Tchoukarine also attributes the fading appeal in the 1930s of Jadranska Straža (which was, rather surprisingly, the largest association in the First Yugoslavia) to the need to mute its defensive character as political relations with Italy shifted and demanded an uneasy rapprochement.
Here, Tchoukarine's language of “cohesion” and “centrifugal forces within the Adriatic Guard”—redolent of (neo) Durkheimian understandings of solidarity—suggests possibilities for further cultural analysis of the association. Writing on a Balkan neighbor (Greece), for example, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has described European nationalisms as operating on the segmentary principles that make for fusion in the face of a common enemy, as elaborated by anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his classic study of a so-called “stateless society,” that of the Nuer.Footnote 2 Although Tchoukarine does not take his analysis in this direction, his conclusions also raise important comparative questions about the very different efforts after 1945 to forge a Yugoslav identification with and experience of naše more by means of both domestic and foreign tourism.Footnote 3
In her piece, “A Poet's Struggle for a New Adriaticism in the Nineteenth Century,” Reill takes up most explicitly those aspects of cultural politics to which Klabjan and Tchoukarine dedicate relatively less space. Granted, this focus on culture proves inherent to Reill's analysis of the artistic efforts by Venetian intellectual Francesco Dall'Ongaro to “harmonize” diverse Adriatic nations within a multinational regional framework. Tracing Dall'Ongaro's intellectual and personal biography, Reill illustrates his transformation from provincial intellectual of Lombardy-Veneto to cosmopolitan writer navigating between overlapping Italian, Illyrianist, and Habsburg artistic circles. The Adriatic served as both catalyst and symbol of this transformation, as Dall'Ongaro's move from Venice to Trieste was accompanied by a shift from a Venetian-centric Adriaticism to a multinational Adriaticist vision. In Reill's telling, Dall'Ongaro's multinational regionalism posited the Adriatic as a fusion of Slavic, Italian, and (to a much lesser extent, it would appear) German cultural interests. Ultimately, however, the critical failure of Dall'Ongaro's play The Dalmatians—for which his Slavicist and Illyrian colleagues accused him of perpetuating negative stereotypes of the Dalmatian Morlacchi—led Dall'Ongaro to retreat from this stance. Subsequently, he inhabited both Italian and Slavic cultural universes but ceased to traffic between the two. As Reill puts it, Dall'Ongaro “wrote Italian national poems and plays and he wrote Illyrianist poems and plays … [but] he no longer melded the two. Interconnections between his two national genres were apparent only in the fact that he was the author of both.”
Reill's analysis of Dall'Ongaro's experiments in Adriatic multinational regionalism highlights the conceptual and political limits of such regionalism. Although Dall'Ongaro's thought contained its fair share of idiosyncrasies, his vision of a multinationalist regionalism was not merely an individual quirk. Rather, Dall'Ongaro's thinking was shaped within broader imperialist contexts in which a number of variants on such regionalist thinking circulated, something Reill details elsewhere.Footnote 4 Through discussion of Dall'Ongaro's poems and plays, Reill introduces readers to a much more complex story of intertwined nationalisms and regionalisms, which for the Adriatic include what she calls “municipal multinationalisms” and “maritime nationalisms.” In concluding that “the history of nationalism, even at its outset in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily or primarily the product of national tunnel vision,” Reill sounds an important cautionary note for scholars of nationalism. What should be stressed in this case is that empire was the crucible for these multinationalisms.Footnote 5
That said, the kinds of regionalist and multinational visions detailed by Reill continue to cast long shadows even into the postimperial era, at least for the Adriatic.Footnote 6 In some instances, this regionalism consisted largely of cultural expressions and in others of more concrete political projects (usually informed by these cultural understandings), such as calls to establish Rijeka as an international free port after World War I or the stillborn Free Territory of Trieste arrangement laid out in the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy. This prompts the question of how to situate the various proposals for international power-sharing schemes for the post-Habsburg Adriatic discussed by Klabjan in his essay within this longer genealogy of Adriatic multinationalisms. Perhaps these represent related but nonetheless distinct versions of Adriatic internationalist ideologies.
Klabjan's article, as noted earlier, goes beyond the narrow vision of the Adriatic conceived largely in the Italian-Slavic or Italian-Slavic-Germanic terms that continued to constrain the Adriaticism of someone like Dall'Ongaro in even his most expansive moments. Dall'Ongaro was not unique in rendering Trieste a metonym for the Adriatic; Klabjan underscores how the northern port-city became a crucial reference point for Austrians and Central Europeans more generally. Certainly, Trieste has excited the historical imagination of a new generation of scholars interested in the Adriatic.Footnote 7 Yet, one cannot help but wonder what other Adriatic realities remain neglected or obscured by this focus on the upper Adriatic. What about the Albanian coastline, another object of Italian irredentist desire (given that the secret 1915 Treaty of London promised Italy not only Trieste and Dalmatia, among other territories, but also the port of Valona or Vlorë), and its “Illyrian” inhabitants? Or the cultural and political significance of Greek speakers in the Adriatic sea space in the modern era? Or Montenegro, which receives little attention even in an account of a pan-Yugoslav vision of the Adriatic like that of Tchoukarine?Footnote 8
The essays in this forum, then, still operate within a fairly restricted set of referents, even if these analyses are much more inclusive than many examples of contemporary scholarship on the Adriatic. This prompts the question: Does this reflect the historic primacy of certain key actors and populations in the Adriatic or, perhaps, the biases of Anglophone (as well as Italian and South Slav) historiography on the region? Or, rather, does it follow from the empirical challenges of studying the multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional space that was (and is) the Adriatic?
In asking this, I wish to highlight related questions about the specific locations of knowledge production concerning the Adriatic, including those of the forum's authors. Although many studies of the so-called “Adriatic Question” often fail adequately to interrogate the Adriatic term of that equation, there does, of course, exist a body of phenomenological work dedicated to the sea itself. Predrag Matvejević's lyrical musings on the Adriatic as one of many seas making up the Mediterranean exemplifies this literature. Although Matvejević draws on archival documents, ancient maps, and other forms of knowing the sea, his emphasis lies on the experiential: on a sea defined by its winds (the jug or scirocco, as well as the maestral or mistral, the garbin, and the infamous bura or bora), its waves and currents, its scents and nets and sponges. Adopting the perspective of participant and observer, Matvejević notes that the land abutting the Adriatic looks different depending on whether it is viewed from the shore itself or from the water. The Adriatic is, declares Matvejević, “a sea of intimacy,” an observation that could possibly be made by a geographer mapping the narrowness of the sea and the density of its coastal settlements but which really speaks to the experience of an author who has known the sea, sailed it, tasted it, and lived it.Footnote 9
All three essays in this forum fruitfully bring this experiential or phenomenological literature on the Adriatic together with political, diplomatic, and cultural histories of efforts to define identity on, through, and in the Adriatic. Again, Reill's paper proves the most explicit on this front, taking as its starting point Dall'Ongaro's ode to the bora, a wind associated exclusively with the Adriatic. Dall'Ongaro penned this poem after a decade of residence in Trieste, where he would have come to know the bora well (sulla pelle or “on his skin”). When Dall'Ongaro deviated from Illyrianist precepts with his play I Dalmati, Niccolò Tommaseo and others criticized Dall'Ongaro for depicting Dalmatian Slavs by means of the same clichéd stereotypes that Venetian and Italian nationalist authors favored. Yet, Reill raises the question whether this squabble, as well as the difference in Dall'Ongaro's various literary products, can be explained by the poet's diverse situated knowledges of the Adriatic acquired during his childhood in the Veneto and later during his Adriatic apprenticeship in Trieste. These knowledges would, of course, be situated quite differently from those of someone like the Dalmatian-born Tommaseo.
In toying with such ideas, we must be careful neither to reify experience nor to ignore the well-established discursive conventions within which intellectuals like Tommaseo and Dall'Ongaro operated (and which proved part and parcel of their situated knowledges). The question nonetheless remains whether (and if so, how) intellectuals, political activists, and others with long-term experience of the Adriatic conceived of the sea space and its surrounding land and peoples differently than did those in more distant centers of power (like Rome or Zagreb or Belgrade or Prague). How, in turn, did intellectuals from diverse areas of the Adriatic differ in their understandings? For example, what kinds of experiences underwrote the conviction of Adriatic Guard activists that the sea was central to Yugoslav national identity and political economy, in contrast to their more continentally minded colleagues? (On these lines, Tchoukarine offers just a few tantalizing glimpses into the backgrounds of Yugoslav Adriaticists like Ivo Tartaglia.) Certainly, the centrality of the Adriatic imaginary for some Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians (as discussed in Klabjan) makes clear that in locating knowledge production about the sea, proximity likely matters, but not in as clear-cut or obvious a way as we might imagine. This, in turn, underscores the question of delimitation: Just how far does the Adriatic sphere of culture and identity extend in any particular historical moment? Furthermore, which individuals can claim to belong to the Adriatic—and hence make a claim that the Adriatic belongs to them?
The dilemma of belonging haunts the text of a writer like Matvejević who ponders whether he qualifies as a Mediterranean or Adriatic subject, given that he was born 50 kilometers inland in Mostar, where one catches occasional whiffs of the Adriatic off the Neretva River.Footnote 10 (Did Dall'Ongaro, hailing from a small town in the Veneto whose river fed into the Adriatic, ever experience a similar identity crisis?) Matvejević uses his own simultaneous status as an Adriatic insider/outsider to highlight the fundamentally ambivalent place the sea occupied in projects of national identity in both the royal and Socialist Yugoslavia.Footnote 11 Furthermore, Croats and other Slavs rarely figure as “typical” Mediterranean or maritime peoples in the imaginaries of many Western and Northern Europeans or even their fellow Mediterraneans.Footnote 12
All three essayists in this forum make plain the limits of Adriaticism, particularly when an era in which empire coexisted with nations and (multi)nationalism yielded to an epoch in which more narrowly defined nation-states acquired primacy. Klabjan recounts the dramatic shifts that came about as the sea was “nationalized” in the late nineteenth century. This partitioning of sea space accelerated with the creation of new states along its shores after World War I. Even as Yugoslavs defended their maritime interests against Italian nationalist claims in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, national tensions within Yugoslavia further divided the sea (and sea from continent). Tchoukarine evidences the persistent continentalist thinking that hampered the Adriatic Guard's efforts to popularize a consciousness of the Adriatic as a Yugoslav sea. In the end, he concludes, “in the disputes between the Croatian national movement and Serbian interests in defending strict centralism, the objectives of the association may have progressively been interpreted as working in favor of Croatian interests.”
Interestingly, Reill attributes much of the failure of a maritime regionalism at its inception in the nineteenth century precisely to the limits of the maritime realm itself to create shared experiences. Implicitly questioning the romanticism that frequently characterizes the phenomenological approach of authors like Matvejević, she asks, “[c]ould nineteenth-century communities anchor their communion in such a watery conduit as the Adriatic in the same way as they could (and did) in urban, alpine, or desert landscapes?” She concludes that they could not, for life in and on the sea did not provide for the sorts of “day-to-day living that created the tolerance required.” Yet in its capacity as conduit, the sea did provide flows of peoples, goods, ideas, and words that had the potential to create a cultural lingua franca or cultural grammar. Even in those ships that Reill depicts as contained vessels, polyglot and multiethnic crews lived alongside one another and created their own argot and ways of living.
In all three articles, then, when the authors consider the extent and content of an Adriatic consciousness, they are necessarily constrained by their data and by the notoriously difficult task of how to measure empirically that intangible quantity, “consciousness.” Future research on these topics may wish to delve further into those aspects of what, to borrow a phrase from Billig, we might term “banal Adriaticism.”Footnote 13 Indicators of banal Adriaticism would consist in less-examined markers of such consciousness, markers that need not always be directed by elites or from above. Consider, for example, the popularity and geographical distribution in the former Yugoslav space of the girl's name Jadranka, derived from the Serbo-Croatian Jadran for Adriatic. Mapping the incidence of this name in the first and second Yugoslavia might prove highly revealing of the spread of Adriaticist feeling even to the bastions of “continental” thinking, particularly after World War II. There likely may not be nearly as many newborns with this name today as there were in the 1960s and 1970s, except in the independent state of Croatia.Footnote 14 To be fair to the authors of the essays contained in this forum, they do draw on a variety of little-tapped but highly illuminating sources, ranging from the poems and plays of Francesco Dall'Ongaro to cartoons and images from Jadranksa Straža's journal to newspapers like those of the Czech Yacht Club in Trieste.
In charting new territory and mining new sources for Adriatic scholarship, these essays make an innovative contribution to work on the wider region. At the same time, they stand poised to make larger interventions into broader debates about the historical construction of sea space, as well as discussions about the nature of historical analysis itself. What Philip Steinberg calls the social construction of the sea varied considerably over time, even within the Adriatic. Warning scholars not to read contemporary understandings in which states treat surrounding waters as an extension of national territory too far back into history, Steinberg's caution about the Mediterranean holds equally true for the Adriatic. Rather, premodern and early modern Mediterranean powers, in Steinberg's words, “constructed the sea as a non possessible space, but one in which and across which state power legitimately could be asserted in the interest of stewarding its bounty.”Footnote 15 Even Venice's treatment of the Adriatic as “mare clausum” from the twelfth century on reflected the logic of so-called empires of access, premised upon control of continental goods via coastal routes and islands, in contrast to empires of possession (though the Venetians would begin to redirect their ambitions to the surrounding terra firma by the fifteenth century).Footnote 16 This changes dramatically with the “nationalization of the sea” that Klabjan details, occurring as it does in the context of broader contests to consolidate territories under a national aegis. But even here, scholars need to beware of a creeping continental or terrestrialized bias. John Gillis suggests that historical writing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “is presented as if it begins and ends at the edges of continents, and dwells almost exclusively on their interiors. All that which lies beyond the shores is either a prelude or aftermath of the grand continental narratives.”Footnote 17
Gillis urges scholars to shift perspective and write history offshore. All of the articles in this forum exemplify the intellectual payoff in going offshore, at least figuratively. These essays could nonetheless go offshore in a much more literal sense, too, by devoting greater attention to actual mappings and understandings of both sea and continental space. This task has both scholarly and political urgency, given that the Adriatic itself has been and remains a key element in the construction of symbolic geographies that encode powerful logics of exclusion and inclusion.Footnote 18 These understandings have historically mapped some groups onto territories to which they are said to “belong,” thereby excluding others. Shifts from older traditions of maritime cartography in the Mediterranean such as portolani and isolari, for example, gave way to the emerging science of geography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with important implications for understandings of the Adriatic.Footnote 19 These geographic approaches come down into the twentieth century interwar period through the anthropogeographical analyses of Yugoslav ethnographers like Jovan Cvijić, who challenged the strategic analyses of mare nostrum so popular in Fascist Italy.Footnote 20 An open question raised by the authors of this forum hence remains: How do we map the Adriatic currents detailed in the essays here within a broader constellation of ideas about sea-land-people-power? Although Matvejević maintains of the sea that “[i]ts boundaries are drawn in neither space nor time,”Footnote 21 this forum points to important new directions for studying those projects that historically have aimed to mark out, police, and challenge such boundaries in the Adriatic and beyond.
You have
Access
Atfirst 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.Footnote 1 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.
All too frequently, in studies of contests to “appropriate Adria” (to use Klabjan's felicitous phrase), the Adriatic itself is assumed or taken for granted, while its particular properties as a sea space remain uninvestigated. Nor is there much examination of how those making claims on and about the Adriatic conceptualized it specifically as a watery realm. These three essays illustrate the cluster of economic, political, and affective concerns that made the Adriatic so central to those powers and peoples whose territories bounded it. The studies by Klabjan and Tchoukarine also demonstrate the perceived import of the Adriatic for states and populations not immediately proximate to the sea. In his essay, for example, Klabjan examines the ways in which Italian and South Slav interests in the sea competed and intersected with those of land-locked states, notably Czechoslovakia and Hungary, whose leaders considered themselves heirs of the Habsburg Empire and hence entitled to access to its maritime outlets. In addition, countries possessed of northern seacoasts quite distant from the Mediterranean—such as Germany and Poland—also nurtured hopes of retaining influence in the former Habsburg maritime realm. Klabjan stresses in particular the strong economic presence of Czech firms in Adriatic port-cities, particularly Trieste, from the later decades of the nineteenth century. After the empire's dissolution, members of the Czechoslovak Trieste Board of Maritime Affairs proposed “that Czechoslovak citizens, as former Austro-Hungarian citizens, should retain certain rights to coastal navigation, fishing, and the extraction of raw materials or to pursue enterprises connected with the sea in which the Czech nationalists had actively invested their capital” (Klabjan). Yet some Czechs, at least, had also invested more than money in the sea. The very spas and baths noted by Klabjan or the Český Yacht-Klub established in Trieste in the late Habsburg era likely created emotional attachments to the sea(side) for those (elite) Czechs who had the opportunities to experience it viscerally.
The issue of such affective ties to the Adriatic emerges more explicitly in Tchoukarine's contribution. Tchoukarine explores the aims, initiatives, and ultimate limitations of Jadranska Straža (Adriatic Guard), an association founded in Yugoslavia in 1922 with the explicit goal of fostering a pan-Yugoslav “consciousness and love toward the Adriatic Sea.” The Adriatic Guard's ultimate goal was no less than “to transform Yugoslavia into a sea-oriented nation.” Although concerned with defending Yugoslavia and its waters against Italian irredentist claims to mare nostrum, the Adriatic Guard devoted just as much energy to bridging cultural, political, and geographic divides within royal Yugoslavia. In particular, proponents of the organization sought to link those Yugoslavs who lived far from the Adriatic's shores to the sea, both in material and symbolic terms.
Although the organization's campaign to promote a sense of ownership of the sea (naše more) among Yugoslavs evidences an indissoluble nexus of economic, political, and cultural interests in the Adriatic, Tchoukarine stresses that it was the political that dominated the Adriatic Guard's agenda. Indeed, editors of the association's journal “were not pleased with articles that only indirectly touched upon politics—i.e., culture or tourism.” This may explain, in part, the limitations of this Adriaticism and its ultimate failure as an explicit program for both political solidarity and economic development within the first Yugoslavia. Tchoukarine also attributes the fading appeal in the 1930s of Jadranska Straža (which was, rather surprisingly, the largest association in the First Yugoslavia) to the need to mute its defensive character as political relations with Italy shifted and demanded an uneasy rapprochement.
Here, Tchoukarine's language of “cohesion” and “centrifugal forces within the Adriatic Guard”—redolent of (neo) Durkheimian understandings of solidarity—suggests possibilities for further cultural analysis of the association. Writing on a Balkan neighbor (Greece), for example, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has described European nationalisms as operating on the segmentary principles that make for fusion in the face of a common enemy, as elaborated by anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his classic study of a so-called “stateless society,” that of the Nuer.Footnote 2 Although Tchoukarine does not take his analysis in this direction, his conclusions also raise important comparative questions about the very different efforts after 1945 to forge a Yugoslav identification with and experience of naše more by means of both domestic and foreign tourism.Footnote 3
In her piece, “A Poet's Struggle for a New Adriaticism in the Nineteenth Century,” Reill takes up most explicitly those aspects of cultural politics to which Klabjan and Tchoukarine dedicate relatively less space. Granted, this focus on culture proves inherent to Reill's analysis of the artistic efforts by Venetian intellectual Francesco Dall'Ongaro to “harmonize” diverse Adriatic nations within a multinational regional framework. Tracing Dall'Ongaro's intellectual and personal biography, Reill illustrates his transformation from provincial intellectual of Lombardy-Veneto to cosmopolitan writer navigating between overlapping Italian, Illyrianist, and Habsburg artistic circles. The Adriatic served as both catalyst and symbol of this transformation, as Dall'Ongaro's move from Venice to Trieste was accompanied by a shift from a Venetian-centric Adriaticism to a multinational Adriaticist vision. In Reill's telling, Dall'Ongaro's multinational regionalism posited the Adriatic as a fusion of Slavic, Italian, and (to a much lesser extent, it would appear) German cultural interests. Ultimately, however, the critical failure of Dall'Ongaro's play The Dalmatians—for which his Slavicist and Illyrian colleagues accused him of perpetuating negative stereotypes of the Dalmatian Morlacchi—led Dall'Ongaro to retreat from this stance. Subsequently, he inhabited both Italian and Slavic cultural universes but ceased to traffic between the two. As Reill puts it, Dall'Ongaro “wrote Italian national poems and plays and he wrote Illyrianist poems and plays … [but] he no longer melded the two. Interconnections between his two national genres were apparent only in the fact that he was the author of both.”
Reill's analysis of Dall'Ongaro's experiments in Adriatic multinational regionalism highlights the conceptual and political limits of such regionalism. Although Dall'Ongaro's thought contained its fair share of idiosyncrasies, his vision of a multinationalist regionalism was not merely an individual quirk. Rather, Dall'Ongaro's thinking was shaped within broader imperialist contexts in which a number of variants on such regionalist thinking circulated, something Reill details elsewhere.Footnote 4 Through discussion of Dall'Ongaro's poems and plays, Reill introduces readers to a much more complex story of intertwined nationalisms and regionalisms, which for the Adriatic include what she calls “municipal multinationalisms” and “maritime nationalisms.” In concluding that “the history of nationalism, even at its outset in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily or primarily the product of national tunnel vision,” Reill sounds an important cautionary note for scholars of nationalism. What should be stressed in this case is that empire was the crucible for these multinationalisms.Footnote 5
That said, the kinds of regionalist and multinational visions detailed by Reill continue to cast long shadows even into the postimperial era, at least for the Adriatic.Footnote 6 In some instances, this regionalism consisted largely of cultural expressions and in others of more concrete political projects (usually informed by these cultural understandings), such as calls to establish Rijeka as an international free port after World War I or the stillborn Free Territory of Trieste arrangement laid out in the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy. This prompts the question of how to situate the various proposals for international power-sharing schemes for the post-Habsburg Adriatic discussed by Klabjan in his essay within this longer genealogy of Adriatic multinationalisms. Perhaps these represent related but nonetheless distinct versions of Adriatic internationalist ideologies.
Klabjan's article, as noted earlier, goes beyond the narrow vision of the Adriatic conceived largely in the Italian-Slavic or Italian-Slavic-Germanic terms that continued to constrain the Adriaticism of someone like Dall'Ongaro in even his most expansive moments. Dall'Ongaro was not unique in rendering Trieste a metonym for the Adriatic; Klabjan underscores how the northern port-city became a crucial reference point for Austrians and Central Europeans more generally. Certainly, Trieste has excited the historical imagination of a new generation of scholars interested in the Adriatic.Footnote 7 Yet, one cannot help but wonder what other Adriatic realities remain neglected or obscured by this focus on the upper Adriatic. What about the Albanian coastline, another object of Italian irredentist desire (given that the secret 1915 Treaty of London promised Italy not only Trieste and Dalmatia, among other territories, but also the port of Valona or Vlorë), and its “Illyrian” inhabitants? Or the cultural and political significance of Greek speakers in the Adriatic sea space in the modern era? Or Montenegro, which receives little attention even in an account of a pan-Yugoslav vision of the Adriatic like that of Tchoukarine?Footnote 8
The essays in this forum, then, still operate within a fairly restricted set of referents, even if these analyses are much more inclusive than many examples of contemporary scholarship on the Adriatic. This prompts the question: Does this reflect the historic primacy of certain key actors and populations in the Adriatic or, perhaps, the biases of Anglophone (as well as Italian and South Slav) historiography on the region? Or, rather, does it follow from the empirical challenges of studying the multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional space that was (and is) the Adriatic?
In asking this, I wish to highlight related questions about the specific locations of knowledge production concerning the Adriatic, including those of the forum's authors. Although many studies of the so-called “Adriatic Question” often fail adequately to interrogate the Adriatic term of that equation, there does, of course, exist a body of phenomenological work dedicated to the sea itself. Predrag Matvejević's lyrical musings on the Adriatic as one of many seas making up the Mediterranean exemplifies this literature. Although Matvejević draws on archival documents, ancient maps, and other forms of knowing the sea, his emphasis lies on the experiential: on a sea defined by its winds (the jug or scirocco, as well as the maestral or mistral, the garbin, and the infamous bura or bora), its waves and currents, its scents and nets and sponges. Adopting the perspective of participant and observer, Matvejević notes that the land abutting the Adriatic looks different depending on whether it is viewed from the shore itself or from the water. The Adriatic is, declares Matvejević, “a sea of intimacy,” an observation that could possibly be made by a geographer mapping the narrowness of the sea and the density of its coastal settlements but which really speaks to the experience of an author who has known the sea, sailed it, tasted it, and lived it.Footnote 9
All three essays in this forum fruitfully bring this experiential or phenomenological literature on the Adriatic together with political, diplomatic, and cultural histories of efforts to define identity on, through, and in the Adriatic. Again, Reill's paper proves the most explicit on this front, taking as its starting point Dall'Ongaro's ode to the bora, a wind associated exclusively with the Adriatic. Dall'Ongaro penned this poem after a decade of residence in Trieste, where he would have come to know the bora well (sulla pelle or “on his skin”). When Dall'Ongaro deviated from Illyrianist precepts with his play I Dalmati, Niccolò Tommaseo and others criticized Dall'Ongaro for depicting Dalmatian Slavs by means of the same clichéd stereotypes that Venetian and Italian nationalist authors favored. Yet, Reill raises the question whether this squabble, as well as the difference in Dall'Ongaro's various literary products, can be explained by the poet's diverse situated knowledges of the Adriatic acquired during his childhood in the Veneto and later during his Adriatic apprenticeship in Trieste. These knowledges would, of course, be situated quite differently from those of someone like the Dalmatian-born Tommaseo.
In toying with such ideas, we must be careful neither to reify experience nor to ignore the well-established discursive conventions within which intellectuals like Tommaseo and Dall'Ongaro operated (and which proved part and parcel of their situated knowledges). The question nonetheless remains whether (and if so, how) intellectuals, political activists, and others with long-term experience of the Adriatic conceived of the sea space and its surrounding land and peoples differently than did those in more distant centers of power (like Rome or Zagreb or Belgrade or Prague). How, in turn, did intellectuals from diverse areas of the Adriatic differ in their understandings? For example, what kinds of experiences underwrote the conviction of Adriatic Guard activists that the sea was central to Yugoslav national identity and political economy, in contrast to their more continentally minded colleagues? (On these lines, Tchoukarine offers just a few tantalizing glimpses into the backgrounds of Yugoslav Adriaticists like Ivo Tartaglia.) Certainly, the centrality of the Adriatic imaginary for some Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians (as discussed in Klabjan) makes clear that in locating knowledge production about the sea, proximity likely matters, but not in as clear-cut or obvious a way as we might imagine. This, in turn, underscores the question of delimitation: Just how far does the Adriatic sphere of culture and identity extend in any particular historical moment? Furthermore, which individuals can claim to belong to the Adriatic—and hence make a claim that the Adriatic belongs to them?
The dilemma of belonging haunts the text of a writer like Matvejević who ponders whether he qualifies as a Mediterranean or Adriatic subject, given that he was born 50 kilometers inland in Mostar, where one catches occasional whiffs of the Adriatic off the Neretva River.Footnote 10 (Did Dall'Ongaro, hailing from a small town in the Veneto whose river fed into the Adriatic, ever experience a similar identity crisis?) Matvejević uses his own simultaneous status as an Adriatic insider/outsider to highlight the fundamentally ambivalent place the sea occupied in projects of national identity in both the royal and Socialist Yugoslavia.Footnote 11 Furthermore, Croats and other Slavs rarely figure as “typical” Mediterranean or maritime peoples in the imaginaries of many Western and Northern Europeans or even their fellow Mediterraneans.Footnote 12
All three essayists in this forum make plain the limits of Adriaticism, particularly when an era in which empire coexisted with nations and (multi)nationalism yielded to an epoch in which more narrowly defined nation-states acquired primacy. Klabjan recounts the dramatic shifts that came about as the sea was “nationalized” in the late nineteenth century. This partitioning of sea space accelerated with the creation of new states along its shores after World War I. Even as Yugoslavs defended their maritime interests against Italian nationalist claims in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, national tensions within Yugoslavia further divided the sea (and sea from continent). Tchoukarine evidences the persistent continentalist thinking that hampered the Adriatic Guard's efforts to popularize a consciousness of the Adriatic as a Yugoslav sea. In the end, he concludes, “in the disputes between the Croatian national movement and Serbian interests in defending strict centralism, the objectives of the association may have progressively been interpreted as working in favor of Croatian interests.”
Interestingly, Reill attributes much of the failure of a maritime regionalism at its inception in the nineteenth century precisely to the limits of the maritime realm itself to create shared experiences. Implicitly questioning the romanticism that frequently characterizes the phenomenological approach of authors like Matvejević, she asks, “[c]ould nineteenth-century communities anchor their communion in such a watery conduit as the Adriatic in the same way as they could (and did) in urban, alpine, or desert landscapes?” She concludes that they could not, for life in and on the sea did not provide for the sorts of “day-to-day living that created the tolerance required.” Yet in its capacity as conduit, the sea did provide flows of peoples, goods, ideas, and words that had the potential to create a cultural lingua franca or cultural grammar. Even in those ships that Reill depicts as contained vessels, polyglot and multiethnic crews lived alongside one another and created their own argot and ways of living.
In all three articles, then, when the authors consider the extent and content of an Adriatic consciousness, they are necessarily constrained by their data and by the notoriously difficult task of how to measure empirically that intangible quantity, “consciousness.” Future research on these topics may wish to delve further into those aspects of what, to borrow a phrase from Billig, we might term “banal Adriaticism.”Footnote 13 Indicators of banal Adriaticism would consist in less-examined markers of such consciousness, markers that need not always be directed by elites or from above. Consider, for example, the popularity and geographical distribution in the former Yugoslav space of the girl's name Jadranka, derived from the Serbo-Croatian Jadran for Adriatic. Mapping the incidence of this name in the first and second Yugoslavia might prove highly revealing of the spread of Adriaticist feeling even to the bastions of “continental” thinking, particularly after World War II. There likely may not be nearly as many newborns with this name today as there were in the 1960s and 1970s, except in the independent state of Croatia.Footnote 14 To be fair to the authors of the essays contained in this forum, they do draw on a variety of little-tapped but highly illuminating sources, ranging from the poems and plays of Francesco Dall'Ongaro to cartoons and images from Jadranksa Straža's journal to newspapers like those of the Czech Yacht Club in Trieste.
In charting new territory and mining new sources for Adriatic scholarship, these essays make an innovative contribution to work on the wider region. At the same time, they stand poised to make larger interventions into broader debates about the historical construction of sea space, as well as discussions about the nature of historical analysis itself. What Philip Steinberg calls the social construction of the sea varied considerably over time, even within the Adriatic. Warning scholars not to read contemporary understandings in which states treat surrounding waters as an extension of national territory too far back into history, Steinberg's caution about the Mediterranean holds equally true for the Adriatic. Rather, premodern and early modern Mediterranean powers, in Steinberg's words, “constructed the sea as a non possessible space, but one in which and across which state power legitimately could be asserted in the interest of stewarding its bounty.”Footnote 15 Even Venice's treatment of the Adriatic as “mare clausum” from the twelfth century on reflected the logic of so-called empires of access, premised upon control of continental goods via coastal routes and islands, in contrast to empires of possession (though the Venetians would begin to redirect their ambitions to the surrounding terra firma by the fifteenth century).Footnote 16 This changes dramatically with the “nationalization of the sea” that Klabjan details, occurring as it does in the context of broader contests to consolidate territories under a national aegis. But even here, scholars need to beware of a creeping continental or terrestrialized bias. John Gillis suggests that historical writing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “is presented as if it begins and ends at the edges of continents, and dwells almost exclusively on their interiors. All that which lies beyond the shores is either a prelude or aftermath of the grand continental narratives.”Footnote 17
Gillis urges scholars to shift perspective and write history offshore. All of the articles in this forum exemplify the intellectual payoff in going offshore, at least figuratively. These essays could nonetheless go offshore in a much more literal sense, too, by devoting greater attention to actual mappings and understandings of both sea and continental space. This task has both scholarly and political urgency, given that the Adriatic itself has been and remains a key element in the construction of symbolic geographies that encode powerful logics of exclusion and inclusion.Footnote 18 These understandings have historically mapped some groups onto territories to which they are said to “belong,” thereby excluding others. Shifts from older traditions of maritime cartography in the Mediterranean such as portolani and isolari, for example, gave way to the emerging science of geography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with important implications for understandings of the Adriatic.Footnote 19 These geographic approaches come down into the twentieth century interwar period through the anthropogeographical analyses of Yugoslav ethnographers like Jovan Cvijić, who challenged the strategic analyses of mare nostrum so popular in Fascist Italy.Footnote 20 An open question raised by the authors of this forum hence remains: How do we map the Adriatic currents detailed in the essays here within a broader constellation of ideas about sea-land-people-power? Although Matvejević maintains of the sea that “[i]ts boundaries are drawn in neither space nor time,”Footnote 21 this forum points to important new directions for studying those projects that historically have aimed to mark out, police, and challenge such boundaries in the Adriatic and beyond.