Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-08T06:32:36.654Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Scramble for Adria”: Discourses of Appropriation of the Adriatic Space Before and After World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2011

Borut Klabjan
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay aims to shed light on the ways in which several empires, states, and nationalist movements competed for political power in the Adriatic space. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which international, national, and local narratives converged in the critical political and economic space of the Adriatic Sea both before and after World War I to justify territorial appropriation. The possibility of geopolitical changes triggered by the Great War whetted the territorial appetites of the new nation-states that had established themselves on the ruins of multinational empires in 1918. At the same time, the same possibilities spurred Italian irredentist aspirations, as Italy directed its imperial policy increasingly toward the East. Hence, the phrase “Scramble for Africa,” which prompted the title of this article, can also be applied to the Adriatic space in the same period.

Information

Type
Forum: A Contested Adriatic
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 42 , April 2011 , pp. 16 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2011

Introduction

This essay aims to shed light on the ways in which several empires, states, and nationalist movements competed for political power in the Adriatic space. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which international, national, and local narratives converged in the critical political and economic space of the Adriatic Sea both before and after World War I to justify territorial appropriation. The possibility of geopolitical changes triggered by the Great War whetted the territorial appetites of the new nation-states that had established themselves on the ruins of multinational empires in 1918. At the same time, the same possibilities spurred Italian irredentist aspirations, as Italy directed its imperial policy increasingly toward the East. Hence, the phrase “Scramble for Africa,” which prompted the title of this article, can also be applied to the Adriatic space in the same period.Footnote 1

Even though significant differences between the Adriatic and African spaces must be considered, interesting parallels can nevertheless be drawn. The aim of this article is not to provide an exhaustive comparative analysis between the two spaces but to suggest how colonial practices were transferred from the African context to a contested “borderland,” maritime region in Europe. In both the Adriatic and in Africa, a race for appropriation occurred that produced acute international friction, as well as significant discourses of territorial appropriation. Although the Adriatic may not have become the “board for the biggest game of Monopoly in history,” as was the case in Africa, nevertheless several European states played their own game here as well.Footnote 2

The Adriatic Region and the “Nationalization of the Sea”

The mechanisms that produced conflict over Adriatic space did not suddenly emerge in the mid twentieth century. Their genesis and mental premises can be found in the national nineteenth century.Footnote 3 The southbound expansion of the Habsburg monarchy toward the Balkans and its emergence as a great power made the Adriatic space into a potential site for new developmental opportunities. In 1717, Emperor Karl VI announced free navigation in the Adriatic Sea, which weakened the role of the Serenissima and reflected a new distribution of power in the region. The Habsburg monarchy sought a visible role in the international economic arena, awarding Rijeka/Fiume and Trieste/Trst the status of free ports in 1719 in order to link them to international markets and to make the Adriatic Sea into a channel for Austrian international trade.

One of the first government interventions was to establish an annual fair in Trieste/Trst to attract textile merchants from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Ultimately, the government hoped that commerce between Italy and the Levant would no longer go via Venice but through Trieste/Trst. The first fair, organized in 1730, failed thanks to poor participation as a result of lack of interest. Merchants from Brno/Brünn, Olomouc/Olmütz, and other northern towns preferred the existing fair venues in Linz and Bolzano/Bozen, and merchants from Prague complained that the customs tariffs and various dues they had to pay on the route to Trieste/Trst and Rijeka/Fiume were too high. Throughout the eighteenth century, the mercantilist Vienna government enacted measures to increase Austria's economic capacity and to enable it to compete on a world market that Western European states and their industries already dominated. For this reason, Austria continued to direct its merchant traffic toward its Adriatic ports.Footnote 4

Although Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II adopted a similar economic policy, trade between the Adriatic ports and the heart of the empire still did not reach the hoped-for extent. In the late 1830s, merchants from Central European regions still preferred to use northern European ports because of their better facilities, lower connection costs, and the higher quality and volume of commercial exchange.Footnote 5 Nevertheless, government stimulation of economic cooperation with Adriatic ports recorded significant successes, and a considerable share of Austria's international trade passed through the port of Trieste/Trst. Among the most important activities, for example, were imports of olive oil, coffee, sugar, and spices through Trieste/Trst to Bohemia, whose own economic importance grew as a result of efficient economic and structural modernization.Footnote 6

The downfall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, which had monopolized the Adriatic space for centuries, and Napoleon's failed attempt to control the eastern Adriatic with his Illyrian Provinces created a power vacuum in the Adriatic space. In a manner similar to their appropriation of Africa, the European powers turned the Adriatic into a stage for international competition in the nineteenth century. Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary increasingly sought hegemony over this “no man's sea.”Footnote 7 Following the unifications of Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century, the Adriatic Sea became an internal lake of the Triple Alliance, formed in 1882 by those newly established states allied with Austria-Hungary.Footnote 8 Although Berlin, Rome, and Vienna reached an understanding regarding the management of the Adriatic Sea, it would be erroneous to think that these agreements produced a lasting balance of power.Footnote 9 The emergence of the national idea, in particular, led to an increasingly overt “nationalization of the sea” that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hence, like the inland territories that bordered it, the Adriatic Sea was also affected by the age of nations and nationalisms and by conflicting nationalist conceptions that each aimed to make the Adriatic Sea into mare nostrum.

Despite its political weakness, Italy held the advantage. As a result of the previous Venetian hegemony, it is not surprising that Fernand Braudel placed Adriatic coastal regions in the “sphere of a triumphant Italian culture.”Footnote 10 Italian nationalist rhetoric frequently cited the centuries-long Italian cultural domination of the region, a rhetoric whose intensity grew with the Risorgimento struggle to achieve political unification of the Apennine peninsula. Some early Italian thinkers, such as Alberto Fortis, depicted their eastern Slav neighbor as a kind of “good savage,” although later thinkers (the early Giuseppe Mazzini or Niccolò Tommaseo), considered Slavs of the eastern Adriatic as allies in the struggle for national and political emancipation. Several later Italian nationalists, however, categorized the “Other,” an undefined “Slav” or “Turk,” in a hierarchically subordinate position.Footnote 11 Even thinkers such as Pacifico Valussi, who in 1848 advocated cooperation among Italians and Slavs, later sided with more aggressive Italian nationalist attitudes toward the Adriatic space.Footnote 12

Key words and concepts of Italian nationalism and irredentism claimed hegemony in the Adriatic: from the mental construct that linked latinità, romanità, venezianità, and therefore italianità to the myth of being ante murale, to the broader claims of christianitatis, or of “Europeans” as “the bearers of civilization” in the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially in the Adriatic.Footnote 13 The rhetorical propaganda intensified during the last decades of the nineteenth century through the Italian annexation of the new, allegedly liberated provinces of the Eastern Adriatic after World War I, finally reaching its apex with the Fascist regime.Footnote 14 By the time Italy entered World War II as a German ally, according to Gordon East, its “position was supreme in Adriatic waters.”Footnote 15 It was then that Mussolini realized his ambition of establishing an Italian Mediterranean empire, finally fulfilling the rhetorical promise of Italian domination in the Adriatic that had originated in the nationalist environment of the nineteenth century.Footnote 16

Adria and Nation-Building

Italy's erstwhile allies and later competitors, however, made their own territorial demands on the Adriatic. The analysis in this section focuses on Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the developing South Slav national(ist) elites within Habsburg society. In the late nineteenth century, each of these elaborated competing versions of “Adriatic consciousness” that sought to legitimize their own hegemony in the region.Footnote 17

Among the most illustrative representatives of a new wave of intellectual perceptions of the Adriatic space is Simon Jenko, a Slovene poet, who as early as 1865 complained that the Adriatic Sea was no longer Slavic. In a poem entitled “Adrijansko Morje” (Adriatic Sea) he wrote “You used to be Slavic,” “When the white towns of our forefathers … flourished,” but then this sea was subjugated by the “foreigner's sword.”Footnote 18 It is evident from this nostalgic poem, later set to music by Anton Hajdrih and still sung by choirs, that in mental terms Jenko's Adriatic Sea was closely united to the land where the Slavs had assimilated into the “Italian culture,” as Braudel formulated.Footnote 19 The use of an historical myth of the supremacy of one group (in this case, the Slavs) over a defined space (the Adriatic) that was being appropriated by other groups (in this case, the Italian population) is of particular importance. In political terms, the first group (in Jenko's case, the Slavs) would be entitled to claim the territory for itself, given its historically prior claim. Jenko complained about the assimilation of the Slavic population, emphasizing whose “oak ship” had been the first to sail the Adriatic, thereby attributing precedence (in the sense that Kolstø defines the historical myth of antiquitas) to the Slavs.Footnote 20 Jenko's poem belonged to a time when a Slovene national intelligentsia had started to make more determined national demands, also with regard to the Adriatic Sea.

As a result of the political and social changes during the Revolution of 1848, and the gradual politicization of local society, only a year later a Slovene-language newspaper entitled Jadranski Slavjan (Adriatic Slav) began publication in Trieste/Trst. By this point, Trieste/Trst had become the most important Austrian port and the town with the largest population of Slovenes.Footnote 21 This newspaper soon ended publication, but similar papers were published in the following decades, for example, Jadranska zarja (Adriatic Dawn), Jadranka (Adriatic Woman), Svetilnik (Lighthouse), Ilirski Primorjan (Littoral Man), Jadranski Almanah (Adriatic Almanac), which titles all emphasized their Adriatic character.

Most of these newspapers supported liberal ideas brought into this space by the Young Slovenes, a political movement that followed the ideals of the Young Czech Party in Bohemia. The Young Slovenes demanded rights for the Slovenes and Slavs of the Adriatic, whereas the Italian liberal-national party dictated the political, economic, and general social tempo. Jadranska zarja compared the Italian party to a “tapeworm drinking life from the body of our country” and warned Vienna against supporting Italian nationhood along the eastern Adriatic coast as a strategy for somehow containing the demands of the region's “Yugoslavs:” “the Adriatic is an Austrian blood vessel, and the blood in this vessel is the Slavs [emphasis is original] because almost all sea traffic is in their hands. On all ships from the huge Lloyd's steam shipping company to the last sailing vessel the master and crew are—Slavs.”Footnote 22 Italian nationalism in Austria and irredentism in Italy based their territorial claims to the region on their own alleged Roman origins and on the alleged historical continuity of the Italian character of the Adriatic space. Slovene and Croat nationalists, in turn, stressed their own ethnic continuity with the original Illyrians, arguing for the autochthonous and primordial character of their nations in comparison to the more recently arrived Italians.Footnote 23

The same claims led to the formation of Slovene and Croatian national sports and cultural associations, economic cooperative associations, and political movements that emphasized their nation's identification to the Adriatic space. Sports associations bore names such as Jadran (Adriatic) and Primorje (Littoral); cultural associations were called Primorec (Littoral Man) and Primorsko (Littoral Region); and the most important bank with mixed Slovene-Croatian-Czech capital in Trieste/Trst was called the Jadranska banka (Adriatic Bank). All of these examples reflect the ways that nationalist organizations evoked the Adriatic Sea in order to identify themselves with the Adriatic space.

This was also a clear sign that southern Slavic nationalists of the Habsburg monarchy not only claimed the inland regions of the eastern Adriatic space for their nations, but they also demanded its coastal regions. These demands were illustrated on a map of Slovene regions that Peter Kozler compiled in 1853; Kozler was a lawyer, politician, geographer, and member of the Viennese Association Slovenija. In 1848, the political program Zedinjena Slovenija [United Slovenija] had first demanded the establishment of a Slovene national territorial unit within the Austrian Empire. Kozler's map of this imagined unit not only included Carniola and its neighboring regions, but it also claimed the entire Bay of Trieste/Trst, between the estuaries of Rivers Soča/Isonzo and Dragonja as Slovene national territory.Footnote 24

This particular area of the eastern Adriatic surrounding Trieste/Trst became the most contested part of this space in the decades to follow. As Karl Stuhlpfarrer wrote of the Austrians, ever since Vienna had chosen it as the monarchy's “window to the world,” it was Trieste/Trst more than any other Adriatic town that had represented the Adriatic Sea in Austrian mental maps. For this reason, it would be misleading to restrict the scramble for the Adriatic to disputes among the bordering powers, in this case Italy, Austria-Hungary, and after 1918 Yugoslavia. Furthermore, as Wörsdörfer rightly asserts, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not simply the states that lay along the shores of the Adriatic that shared this space. In fact, several countries that bordered the Adriatic Sea “indirectly,” or that maintained critical interests in this area, lodged claims as well.Footnote 25

Stuhlpfarrer's felicitous denotation of Trieste/Trst—and, consequently, the entire northeastern Adriatic—as a mental point of reference for Austrians can be applied to a broader Central European space. The mental attachment to an Adriatic horizon not only reached Vienna, but also well beyond, to Prague, Budapest, Bavaria, Slovakia, and southern Poland. Czech writer Václav Karel Krofta's enthusiasm after his first “encounter” with the Adriatic Sea in 1923 is characteristic of Central European mental structures in the early twentieth century.Footnote 26 The Adriatic space evoked a sense of attachment not only in Austria (understood both as Cisleithania and as the Republic of Austria established after World War I), but also in territories outside the territorial legacy of the Habsburg Empire.

This attachment to the Adriatic space reached as far as Germany, which in the nineteenth century had played an important political, diplomatic, and economic role in the region. In fact, some radical German nationalist organizations in Germany, such as the Alldeutsche Verband, never renounced the dream of acquiring an Adriatic coast for Germans.Footnote 27 Their radical imperialist vision rejected the small-German nation-state and instead conceived of a Germany located wherever there were German-speaking people in Europe. In particular, these radical nationalists viewed the city of Trieste/Trst as a potential southern outpost of their hypothetical German empire that might someday stretch from the North Sea to the Adriatic. Trieste/Trst would be the end of a German bridge to the Adriatic (“Brücke zur Adria”). Together with other German nationalist organizations in Cisleithania, they supported the establishment of German schools, cultural, and sports organizations in the city. The most important local German nationalist association was the Schillerverein, with almost 2,000 members, most, but not all, coming from the local German-speaking bourgeoisie. Another important association, the Deutscher Schulverein, promoted the creation of German schools in multinational areas of the Hapsburg monarchy and already had a branch in Trieste in 1881. The organization Verein Südmark founded a branch in Trieste/Trst in 1896. Its members were generally newer German-speaking immigrants to the city. The Südmark believed that Germans should not merely “[observe] the Adriatic from the [distant] mountain peaks of Carinthia”; on the contrary, they intended to promote the city's German character.Footnote 28

Even though such visions could not be a part of official German state policy, German nationalist organizations did not renounce them. This enabled their nationalist opponents in the region to propagate a straw man argument that cited the radical German nationalist propaganda to incite fears of a possible German “Drang nach Adria.”Footnote 29 In addition to Slovene nationalists, who often represented themselves as a bastion against a potential German penetration of the Adriatic, it was undoubtedly Czech nationalists who perceived Germans and German nationalism as an obstacle to the realization of their own nationalist interests, be those political, economic, or cultural. A Czech-German nationalist conflict also took place along the shores of the Adriatic, far from Bohemia and Moravia.

Trieste/Trst and the northern Adriatic had become important points of reference for the Czech nationalists. Through Trieste/Trst (Terst, in Czech), Czech capital spread into the world, and the city was a very important center for the expansion of Czech business. An early example of this was the Czech national bank Slavia. After its establishment in Prague in 1869, Slavia's activities had originally been limited to supporting local Czech businesses. As business increased, however, Slavia started a southbound expansion. Encouraged by ideas of “slavic solidarity,” it opened a general office in Ljubljana/Laibach in 1869, which moved to Trieste/Trst in 1874. During this time, a network of banking organizations had developed in Trieste/Trst, thanks mostly to the growing expectation that after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 traffic through the port of Trieste/Trst would increase.Footnote 30 Slavia's operations rested largely on the arrangement of insurance contracts, which by itself, however, turned out not to be profitable enough to sustain the bank. The short-lived attempt of Slavia in Trieste/Trst provides us with an opportunity to understand the direction in which economic development was heading, because Slavia paved the way for other Czech firms in the region. In the following years, the most active bank in the export of its capital toward the southeast was the Živnostenská banka from Prague.Footnote 31

In their expansion toward the sea, Czech enterprises, in particular banks, leaned on Slovene national organizations, too.Footnote 32 Along with a growing number of cooperatives, loan societies, savings banks, and various enterprises, the Jadranska banka was opened in 1905. In addition to Slovene capital, Croats, Serbs, and later Czechs contributed to the nominal capital of the bank, which Bernard Michel described as a “good example of Slavic common action.”Footnote 33 In this way, a Czech national economy expanded toward the south and built important posts in Trieste/Trst and along the Adriatic. The presence of Czech capital along the Adriatic grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century. Jaroslav Preiss, an intellectual, journalist, and one of the most important Czech bankers, wrote that “banks in Ljubljana/Laibach, Trieste/Trst, in Croatia, and in Dalmatia fix their eyes on Prague, as a natural center of monetary commerce of the Slavic world.”Footnote 34 At the neo-Slavic congress held in Prague in 1908, Preiss commended Trieste/Trst's role as “one of the dominant positions of Slavic capital in the struggle against German penetration.”Footnote 35

The dynamic economic activities of the Cisleithanian Slavic nationalist bourgeois—in particular, the Czechs—brought them growing influence in local society.Footnote 36 In Trieste/Trst, they founded a Česká beseda (Czech Club) in 1909; and within that umbrella association, they established the Český Yacht-Klub in 1910. Oto Dvořák, son of composer Antonín Dvořák and an employee of the Trieste/Trst subsidiary of the Sporobanka (Central Bank of Czech Savings Banks, Ústřední banka českých spořitelen or Sporobanka), was an initiator of these activities. Through him and other members, the club bought a sailboat, which they named Rusalka after one of Dvořák's best-known operas. The Český Yacht-Klub published a newspaper, Hlas Adrie (Voice of Adria). In the first issue published on 1 March 1911, the club outlined a plan for a Czech presence in the Adriatic which, in its opinion, should have a predominantly national-economic character. Through the establishment and consolidation of existing financial contacts with other Slavs living in Trieste/Trst, they would “realize one of the tasks of Slavic solidarity.”Footnote 37

The establishment of a Slavic yacht club in Trieste/Trst quickly attracted attention. Slovene nationalists had considered taking the same step several times but had not done so because they had insufficient financial means. The Trieste/Trst Slovene liberal daily Edinost (Unity) expressed its pleasure at the foundation of a Czech club. The Grazer Tagespost from Graz/Gradec and the Trieste/Trst Italian national-liberal Il Piccolo each warned against Slavic “expansionist tendencies” from its own point of view; Il Piccolo even accused the government of “importing” Czechs to Trieste/Trst.Footnote 38

Controversies continued in the following months when the Grazer Tagespost quoted a text published in the Czech newspaper Hlas Adrie, warning the public that “Vaclav's sons are moving with true Czech obstinacy to the conquest of Adria.”Footnote 39 The text highlighted, in particular, an expansion of Czech capital that threatened German nationalist interests in the region. Edinost again took a stand in favor of the Czechs and claimed that the Czechs “as Slavs have domicile rights in Trieste/Trst,” whereas the Germans were foreigners who enjoyed “Slavic-Italian hospitality and—are abusing it.”Footnote 40

Czech demands primarily concerned the economic exploitation of the Adriatic Sea by financial entities—for example, banks, insurance companies, and other enterprises—financed by “national capital.” It is in this spirit that we should understand the article “To the Sea!” borrowed by the Triestine newspaper Edinost from the Czech newspaper Český list (Czech Paper, published in Zagreb). In his article, the author emphasized to Czech merchants, economists, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople the importance of maintaining a Czech presence in the Adriatic and, in particular, in Trieste/Trst: “Trieste/Trst, today fought over by Slavs [and Italians] and where German expansion is gravitating, has to be the Czech outlet to the sea…. The Adriatic Sea is the only favorable future opening for our merchandise to the Balkans. To ensure future economic connections with the Balkans order must be restored in this volcanic corner of Europe.”Footnote 41 Odon Pára, a Czech engineer in Trieste/Trst employed by the Südbahn and secretary of the association Česká beseda, agreed with the importance of the Adriatic space to Czech interests; however, he also believed that it was necessary for Czech and Slovene nationalists to bring their policies into line with each other. He asserted that what he called the “Germanization of Slovenes,” particularly in Carinthia and Styria, was also directed toward the Czechs, because an eventual German victory would close Czech access to Trieste/Trst.Footnote 42

The Adriatic Question During and After World War I

Blocking German expansion was one of the main concerns of a Czech nationalist “Adriatic policy” that several European states shared. The London Pact, under whose terms Italy entered World War I on the side of the Entente in May 1915, should also be interpreted in this sense. In signing this pact, Great Britain, France, and Tsarist Russia gave Italy future control of the Adriatic in order to prevent the enemy, in this case Germany, from advancing toward the south. If the treaty contributed to the Italian decision to join the forces of the Entente, it also created new dynamics around the Adriatic issue. Slovene, Croatian, and other southern Slavic nationalist political elites may have criticized aspects of Habsburg policy, but they also feared the possibility of territorial annexation to Italy. Despite the absence of a uniform stance on this issue among political representatives of the individual nationalist movements, during the war they gradually developed increasingly determined demands for the formation of an independent Yugoslav state, and this, too, gave an entirely new dimension to the Adriatic issue.Footnote 43

Sidney Sonnino led the Italian foreign policy that opposed the creation of Yugoslavia almost until the end of the war. Sonnino did support a reduction of the Habsburg monarchy, but he did not want its disintegration. He aimed to grant Italy a monopoly position in the Adriatic space and saw a future Yugoslav state as a potential competitor. Some other Italian politicians favored more concrete cooperation with a future Yugoslav state even though this would lead to an attenuation of Italian demands on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Politician Leonida Bissolati; historian and editor of the socialist daily L'Unità, Gaetano Salvemini; publicist, Zanotti Bianco; journalist of the Milan daily Il Corriere della Sera, Giovanni Amendola; and director of the same newspaper, Luigi Alberitini, each from his own point of view supported a positive approach to Yugoslav demands, even though this would mean renouncing some parts of Dalmatia.

Other European politicians took similar stances, for example, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, one of the most important advocates of the destruction of the Habsburg monarchy. Masaryk supported a Yugoslav-Italian alliance that might prevent a German “Drang nach Südosten.” In a memorandum he prepared for the British government at the beginning of the war, Masaryk asserted that domination in the Adriatic required a powerful navy and not a “poor and bare” coast, as he referred to Dalmatia. In his opinion, Italy should be given Trieste/Trst, Pula/Pola, and Vlorë/Vlora in order to create a defense line that could stop German expansion against both southern and northern Slavs. In his words, the “way from Berlin not only passes Istanbul but also Trieste/Trst and Venice.”Footnote 44 However, Sonnino remained skeptical toward the independence plans of the Slavic nationalists of the Habsburg monarchy until the postwar peace conference.Footnote 45

Before and during the war, the “Adriatic question,” the name attributed to the dispute between Italy and the southern Slavs for control over the eastern Adriatic coast, had led to numerous publications.Footnote 46 Pamphlets and essays had become the means to convince both political elites and the broader public of the justness of each side's claims. As early as 1915, Italian writers had used geographical, political, cultural, economic, military, historical, and “civilizational” arguments to build a moral foundation for the implementation of the London Pact, which would not only have granted Italy southern Tirol and other Austrian hinterland territories, but also Trieste/Trst, Istra/Istria, some islands in the Bay of Kvarner/Quarnero, and parts of Dalmatia and Greece.Footnote 47 Those who opposed Italian hegemony in the region wrote similar texts. Unlike Italian publications that emphasized “civilizational” connections between the west and east shores of the Adriatic Sea,Footnote 48 the proponents of Yugoslavia used data on the linguistic composition of local populations that it claimed were mostly Slavic in character. Proponents of Yugoslavism framed Italian demands as imperialistic, claiming that the Italians did not respect the principle of a just division based on the criteria of nationality that Woodrow Wilson had elaborated in his Fourteen Points to the American Congress in January 1918.Footnote 49 Goran Cvijić, Serbian geographer and chair of the committee for territorial questions, for example, also sought to prove a geographical connection among the Yugoslav nations at the peace conference in Paris.Footnote 50 The Yugoslav sides also claimed that despite their Italian national character, the towns on the eastern Adriatic coast were situated in a territorial context that was clearly Slavic. Applying the terminology of that time, it could be said that the Italian towns were like islands in a Slavic sea.Footnote 51

The Adriatic diatribes, aggravated by Gabriele D'Annunzio's legionaries' occupation of Rijeka/Fiume and by the offended departure of the Italian delegation from the Paris Peace Conference, were only resolved on 12 November 1920, with the Treaty of Rapallo between Italy and the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.Footnote 52 The treaty contributed substantially to the normalization of relations between the two neighboring states, given that, in the words of Zagreb University professor Grga Novak in 1932, with the Treaty Yugoslavia “got its own sea.”Footnote 53 Nevertheless, because of the anger about the alleged “mutilated victory” that continued to prevail in Italy and the feelings of political-diplomatic defeat among Yugoslavs, in particular, the perception of injustice thanks to the “loss” of Trieste/Trst, Primorska/Littoral, Istra/Istria, and Rijeka/Fiume, texts on the “lost sea” continued to be written and to some extent became harsher in tone. In a pamphlet published in 1927, the National Minorities Institute in Ljubljana, founded in 1925 to monitor Slovene communities in neighboring countries, spoke of an “Italo-Yugoslav malaise, or sense of uneasiness.”Footnote 54 In the prewar years, several publications had put forward plans of mutual cooperation between Italians and “Austrian Yugoslavs” (in the phrase of Slovene lawyer and publicist Karl Slanc), in particular, as a means to oppose a German national advance. After the war, as a result of mutual resentment, political weakness, and the absence of the third party (German) threat, these interactions became more difficult.Footnote 55

Fifty years later, the pessimistic verses of Jenko's poem “Morje Adrijansko” still seemed relevant to the situation. In Jadranka, “the gazette of conscious women” published in Trieste/Trst before Italian authorities abolished the Slovene and Croatian press in the mid 1920s, an anonymous writer adapted Jenko's poem to the political-national situation on the anniversary of the Italian nationalist burning of the Slovene “Narodni dom” (National Home) in Trieste/Trst.Footnote 56 After Italy's annexation of the northern Adriatic and its subsequent legitimation of this act by accentuating the alleged Roman nature of the territory, this poem emphasized Slovene primacy in the region: “What was ours, ours shall be, we were first along the Adriatic Sea!”Footnote 57 Slovene teacher and publicist Marija Grošelj wrote similarly for Mladi stražarji (Young Guards), a Yugoslav publication of the 1930s, referring to Jenko's “Morje Adrijansko” in terms of the “looted prey” of the River Soča/Isonzo and the Adriatic Sea. Works by Italian poets such as Dante, Ariosto, and Mazzini who had also written about the “Slavic character” of the eastern Adriatic now became weapons in the hands of Slovene and Croatian publicists in their struggle to limit Italian demands.Footnote 58 One of the first plays by Slovene poet and writer Tone Seliškar was dedicated to the “wrongful loss” of the former Austrian Littoral (Trieste/Trst with its hinterland), Istra/Istria, and Dalmatia. This 1920 play, entitled Morje plaka (The Sea Is Crying) begins by setting the scene as follows:

The walls of the stage are covered with national flags. In the middle there is a tall pillar with a picture of the Adriatic Sea (Dalmatian coast). The pillar is lined with black wrapping. Under the wrapping there are ivy and flowers wound around the pillar. In front of the pillar Slovenija (an old woman) is kneeling there, on the left side a prisoner is standing, and next to him Dalmacija. In front of the old woman Istra, next to her Gorica.Footnote 59

Hagen Schulze has written that after the French loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, black mourning bands were hung on the maps of these two regions in French schools in order to maintain both an emotional attachment to the lost parts of the national body and feelings of guilt about their loss. Although it is not known whether nationalists employed similar strategies in the Italian-Yugoslav case, it is undoubtedly true that reciprocal recriminations (especially among Slovenes and Croats who had to emigrate to Yugoslavia or to foreign countries) left a mark on the shores of the Adriatic.Footnote 60 For Croatian and Slovene nationalists, as with their Italian counterparts, the Adriatic Sea became conceptually one with the lost towns and territories that Italy annexed. This is the reason why Zdravko Ziljan claimed that the eastern Adriatic coast belonged to Yugoslavs, and the Balkans to its population. As long as Italy failed to understand this, “the Adriatic waves will not be appeased.”Footnote 61

The publications clearly demonstrate that the dynamic of claims and counterclaims that developed after World War I, was not the product of new states that emerged from the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy, but rested instead on previously established demands. Furthermore, responsibility for these postwar conflicts cannot simply be attributed to Italy and Yugoslavia, but must rather be distributed among all the states that took an interest in the exploitation of the Adriatic. In addition to Italy and Yugoslavia, these states included Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Despite being physically cut off from the Adriatic Sea after the war, all these other states nevertheless maintained Adriatic policies.

Undoubtedly, the Austrian Republic was the state with the closest economic contact to the Adriatic as a result of the traditional role the Adriatic space had played for the Habsburg monarchy. The idea of a form of renewed union or connection between postwar Austria and the Adriatic Sea continued even after World War II, when plans for the formation of a buffer zone between Italy and Yugoslavia, which would include Austria, were put forward.Footnote 62 Other Central European states made similar claims or attempted to play a role in the region, in particular, interwar Czechoslovakia. Its first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, considered the question of Czechoslovak access to the Adriatic Sea one of the vital problems of their newly established state. In 1918, in the final months of war and then immediately after the war, Czechoslovakia's Trieste Board of Maritime Affairs (Československý námořní výbor v Terstu) claimed that only unimpeded access to the sea would allow adequate long-term development for all countries situated in the Central European hinterland with no outlet to the sea.Footnote 63

The Czechoslovak Board argued further that Trieste/Trst should be subject to international control and that Hamburg, Rijeka/Fiume, and Trieste/Trst should be proclaimed free ports. In addition, the Board suggested that Czechoslovak citizens, as former Austro-Hungarian citizens, should retain certain rights to the exploitation of the Adriatic Sea. What the Board had in mind were 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, such as spas and baths.Footnote 64 Such proposals, including the establishment of a 200-kilometer-long corridor to connect Czechoslovakia with Yugoslavia that would include a rail line, were embraced by official Czechoslovak diplomacy and put forward at the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 65 Even though the Czech delegation did not succeed with its “Adriatic demands” and the state started to direct its export-import business flows toward the North Sea ports in the mid 1920s, the Adriatic Sea remained an important “security valve” for Czechoslovak international trade.Footnote 66

Hungarian connections with this area were also rooted deeply in the nineteenth century, because Hungary had gained Rijeka/Fiume and the northern part of the Dalmatian coast after the Compromise of 1867. Hence, Hungary could, like Austria, create a maritime profile.Footnote 67 As early as 1846, Lajos Kossuth had emphasized the importance of the sea to Hungarian national interests, although Rijeka/Fiume later played an important role in the larger visions of Hungary's political and economic elite.Footnote 68 The Hungarian elite supported Rijeka/Fiume's development and like the Austrian authorities, who built the Südbahn railway to connect Vienna to Trieste/Trst in 1857, the Hungarians linked Budapest to Rijeka/Fiume with the MAV/Magyar Államvasutak railway line in 1873.Footnote 69 Rijeka/Fiume conducted export-import activities through the shipping company Austro-Hungarian Lloyd, which in 1882 was joined by a second Hungarian steamship company, the Adria Line (The Adria Magyar Tangerhajózási Tarsasag) that successfully developed business activities with ports in the western Mediterranean. Over the following years, other companies such as the Ungaro-Croata Company were established that engaged in local navigation along the Adriatic coast.Footnote 70

Thanks to significant support from the central authorities, Rijeka/Fiume became a dynamic Adriatic center of commerce. As a node of maritime commerce and overland communications, the town played a very important role linking the hinterlands to other, increasingly transcontinental economic spaces. These economic policies had an impact on the population growth, changing the social structure, ethnic structure, and cultural image of Rijeka/Fiume and the other town ports that were all characterized by a religiously diverse population and a growing cosmopolitan spirit.Footnote 71 With the advent and development of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and subsequent urbanization, the centers of gravity of economic geography changed. Port-towns preserved and increased their role as links among large economic regions and national spaces.Footnote 72 Given this development, the defeat of Austria-Hungary and the subsequent treaties produced significant consequences. For example, Article 311 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain granted Austria and Article 294 of the Treaty of Trianon granted Hungary free access to the Adriatic Sea. Article 322 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain and Article 306 of the Treaty of Trianon also mandated that Austria and Hungary, respectively, had to grant access to Adriatic ports to Czechoslovakia. In addition, these articles required that all newly formed states retain railway rates on their lines at prewar levels.Footnote 73

One of the most critical chapters of the Habsburg legacy concerned railways. The very survival of the newly formed states largely depended on their access to railways and on the availability of wagons and locomotives. In the years after World War I, the American Relief Administration Organization, headed by Herbert Hoover, shipped large quantities of goods, food, and medicine to Europe, without which the war-stricken areas could hardly have recovered. Material supply depended significantly on railway lines that had connected northeastern Adriatic ports (Trieste/Trst and Rijeka/Fiume) with Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Cracow, Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg, and other Central European centers during the war.Footnote 74

For Poles, the Adriatic was of secondary importance, and yet it would be erroneous to think they had no interest in it. After the reestablishment of an independent Poland in 1918, Poles directed their attention almost exclusively to developing their own coastal centers on the Baltic Sea and specifically their ports such as Gdynia. Quotidian discourse in postwar Poland was almost exclusively dedicated to the problem of the Polish corridor and to the development of Poland as a Baltic Sea power. Despite its orientation toward the Baltic Sea, however, Poland never abandoned its interests in the Adriatic area, as is clearly reflected in a pamphlet written by the Polish consul to Trieste/Trst, Wladimir Kwiatkowski. Kwiatkowski's text, first published in Polish and then in Italian, aimed to enhance economic exchange and transit of goods through the port of Trieste/Trst, which he saw as an important outlet for Polish trade with the Levant and the Far East. Economic cooperation with Trieste/Trst itself was important as well, as in the consul's words, it could rely on a fertile cooperation that dated back to Habsburg times, when Trieste/Trst and Galicia had been part of Cisleithania.Footnote 75

Conclusion

The extent of Adriatic space has often depended on perceptions of regional hegemony exercised by multinational empires and nation-states that have bordered it, from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires to the Republic of Venice, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Hence, the appropriation of the Adriatic meant not only controlling the region's coasts, but also its broader hinterlands.Footnote 76 Despite possible associations of the Adriatic Sea with concepts of fluidity, we can conclude that as far as empires, nationalists, and nation-states were concerned, the Adriatic Sea was hardly fluid in its boundaries but rather compact and concrete, just as imperialist territorial claims of European empires were on the African continent.Footnote 77 Competition over Adriatic space was rooted in the formation of national movements and nation-states with imperial ambitions and irredentist claims. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalists in nation-states or in multinational empires have politicized borderlands, be they on land or at sea, in order to appropriate these contested areas, to nationalize them, and to subjugate these often multinational (or a-national) peripheries to a nationally homogeneous center.Footnote 78

Viewed in these terms, the rhetoric produced by the “Scramble for Adria” is comparable to that produced by the Scramble for Africa, as well as to conflicts over other contested borderlands and frontier regions. The exploitation of the Adriatic, whether as a canal leading to the Mediterranean, to the Near and Far East, or as a bridge to penetrate Balkan markets, generated individual narrative practices and larger appropriation policies of European states, often similar to the case of Africa. Hence, Joseph Conrad's African Heart of Darkness found an equivalent in Vanni D'Alessio's Istrian Contested Heart. In the hundred years that followed the publication of Conrad's most famous work, there have been many attempts to pin down the Northern Adriatic, symbolized by the Istrian Heart. Here, the Istrian peninsula represents a site of cultural interaction where indistinctiveness between land and sea is reflected in the indistinctiveness of national boundaries that the different nationalists competing for the Adriatic space demanded.Footnote 79

In Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Peter Sahlins argues that “frontier regions are privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions”; yet such distinctions are practically impossible to draw in the Adriatic region.Footnote 80 It is indeed impossible to delineate ethnic borders among the Slavic, Romance, and German peoples in the region. In 1912, Angelo Vivante, the enfant terrible of the Italian intellectual elite in Trieste/Trst, argued in Irredentismo Adriatico, that the region constituted an intersection of the three peoples and could be ruled by none of them.Footnote 81 In view of that claim, it is vitally important to take into account a broad reading of power dynamics and border struggles when analyzing the intersections of international, national, and local narratives in the Adriatic region. Only by applying the elements of “entangled history” to the analysis of the history of the region can the “Scramble for Adria” be integrated into a wider European history.Footnote 82

References

1 The word “scramble” was used for the first time in relation to a territory by the London daily The Times in September 1884 at the time of the Berlin Conference. Wesseling, H. L., Imperialism and Colonialism: Essays on the History of European Expansion (Westport, CN, London, 1997), 87–99Google Scholar.

2 Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004)Google Scholar, 233.

3 Ballinger, Pamela, “La frantumazione dello spazio adriatico, [The Shattering of the Adriatic Space]” in Immaginare l'Adriatico, ed. Cocco, Emilio and Minardi, Everardo (Milan, 2007), 27–44Google Scholar.

4 Rumpler, Helmut, “Economia e potere politico. Il ruolo di Trieste nella politica di sviluppo economico di Vienna, [Economy and Political Power: The Role of Trieste in the Politics of Viennese Economic Development]” in Storia economica e sociale di Trieste, vol. 2, ed. Finzi, Roberto et al. , 55–124 (Trieste, 2003)Google Scholar; see also in the same volume Giovanni Panjek, “Una ‘commercial officina’ fra vie di mare e di terra, [A “Commercial Laboratory” Between Sea and Land Routes]” 235–348.

5 Čechura, Jaroslav, Hlavačka, Milan, “Handel und Kommunikationen in den böhmischen Ländern vom Mittelalter bis zur industriellen Revolution,” in Das Binnenhandel und die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, ed. Gyimesi, S., 200–240 (Budapest, 1989)Google Scholar, 220.

6 Berend, Ivan T., Decades of Crisis (Los Angeles, London, 1998)Google Scholar, 20.

7 For recent work on the national issue in the Adriatic space, see Cattaruzza, Marina, ed., Nazionalismi di frontiera. Identità contrapposte sull'Adriatico nord-orientale 1850–1950 [Border Nationalisms: Opposing Identities in the Northeastern Adriatic 1850–1950] (Soveria Mannelli, 2003)Google Scholar. A deeper insight into the French stance on the Adriatic space before World War I is revealed in Riosa, Alceo, Adriatico irredento. Italiani e Slavi sotto la lente francese (1793–1918)[Adriatico Irredento: Italians and Slavs Under the French Lens (1793–1918)] (Naples, 2009)Google Scholar.

8 On the Adriatic Sea as the internal sea of the Triple Alliance, see Wörsdörfer, Rolf, “Visioni germaniche dell'area adriatica. Dalla costruzione della Südbahn alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale [German Visions of the Adriatic Area: From the Laying of the Südbahn to the End of World War II]” in Adriatico contemporaneo, ed. Trinchese, Stefano and Caccamo, Francesco, 189–214 (Milan, 2008)Google Scholar.

9 On naval policy and the role of the Adriatic Sea in the context of Austrian-Italian-German relations, see Sondhaus, Lawrence, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918 (West Lafayette, IN, 1994)Google Scholar.

10 Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995)Google Scholar, 131.

11 Fortis, Alberto, Viaggio in Dalmazia [Journey to Dalmatia] (Venice, 1987)Google Scholar. The conceptualization of this phenomenon and the presentation of Fortis' and the enlightenment perspectives of the eastern Adriatic can be found in Wolff, Larry, Venezia e gli Slavi [Venice and the Slavs] (Rome, 2006)Google Scholar. For concepts of cooperation between the Italian and Slavic worlds, see Pirjevec, Jože, Niccolò Tommaseo tra Italia e Slavia [Niccoló Tommaseo: Between Italy and Slavdom] (Venice, 1977)Google Scholar; also Pirjevec, “Mazzini in južni Slovani, [Mazzini and the South Slavs]” Zgodovinski časopis [Historical Review], 27, 329–42. For the role of historians in the history of the northern Adriatic region, see Marta Verginella, “Zgodovinjenje slovensko-italijanske meje in obmejnega prostora, [Historization of the Slovene-Italian Border and of the Border Area]” Acta Histriae 18, nos. 1–2 (2010): 207–16. For multinationalism and regional identity in the eastern Adriatic space, see also Reill, Dominique, “A Mission of Mediation: Dalmatia's Multi-national Regionalism from the 1830s–60s,” in Different Paths to the Nation, ed. Cole, Laurence, 16–36 (Houndsmills, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Pirjevec, Jože, “Trst je naš!” Boj Slovencev za morje (1848–1954) [Trieste/Trst is Ours! The Struggle of Slovenes for the Sea (1848–1954)] (Ljubljana, 2008), 31–32Google Scholar; cf. Valussi, Pacifico, L'Adriatico in relazione agli interessi nazionali dell'Italia [The Adriatic in the National Interests of Italy] (1871)Google Scholar.

13 Among numerous publications on this issue, a recent one is Ferraioli, Giano Paolo, “La visione politica dell'Adriatico dalla fine dell'Ottocento agli esordi del fascismo, [The Political Vision of the Adriatic from the End of the 19th Century to the Beginning of the Fascist Era]” in Adriatico contemporaneo, ed. Trinchese, Stefano and Caccamo, Francesco, 189–214 (Milan, 2008)Google Scholar; in the same volume, see also Olga Tamburini, “‘Oltre la foschia.’ Orientalizzazione dell'Italia e percezione dell'Adriatico nel primo ventennio del Novecento, [‘Over the Haze’: Orientalization of Italy and the Perception of the Adriatic in the Frist Twenty Years of the 20th Century]” 41–64, and Piero di Girolamo, “Mare comune o terra di conquista? La percezione dell'Adriatico attraverso le riviste del fascismo. Il caso de ‘L'Adriatico,’[Common Sea or Land to conquer? The Perception of the Adriatic Through the Fascist Journals, The Case of the l'Adriatico]” 215–32. See also the special issue “La monarchia austro-ungarica tra irredentismi e nazionalismi. L'azione della Lega Nazionale ai confini italici, [The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy Between Irredentisms and Nationalisms: The Action of the Lega Nazionale at the Italic Border]” Quaderni giuliani di storia XV, 1 (1994)Google Scholar.

14 The continuity of nationalist rhetoric before and after World War I is reflected in Giulio Italico (Giuseppe Cobol), Guida descrittiva di Trieste (la fedele di Roma) e l'Istria (nobilissima) [Descriptive Guide of Trieste (The Loyal City of Rome) and Istria (The Noble)], (Trieste, 1923).

15 East, Gordon, Mediterranean Problems (London, 1940)Google Scholar, 102.

16 Frascani, Paolo, Il mare [The Sea] (Bologna, 2008), 125–66Google Scholar. Among the most recent publications on Mussolini's Mediterranean Empire, see Rodogno, Davide, Il nuovo ordine Mediterraneo. Le politiche di occupazione dell'Italia fascista in Europa, 1940–1943 [The New Mediterranean Order: The Politics of Occupation of Fascist Italy in Europe, 1940–1943] (Torino, 2003)Google Scholar; Burgwyn, James H., Empire on the Adriatic (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Ben-Ghiat, Ruth and Fuller, Mia, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the classic work by Smith, Denis Mack, Mussolini's Roman Empire (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

17 Braudel, Mediterranean, 132.

18 Jenko, Simon, Pesmi [Poems] (Ljubljana, 2002)Google Scholar, 68.

19 Braudel, too, speaks of the assimilation of the Slavic population into the common Italian milieu and of “invented Italian genealogies.” Braudel, Mediterranean, 132.

20 On the use of historical myths that can also be applied to the Adriatic space, see Kolstø, Pål, “Procjena uloge historijskih mitova u modernim društvoma, [Estimate of the Role of Historical Myths in Modern Societies]” Historijski mitovi na Balkanu [Historical Myths in the Balkans] (Sarajevo, 2002), 11–38Google Scholar.

21 Trieste/Trst and the part of the coast west of the town with fisherman villages, for example, Barcola/Barkovlje, Contovello/Kontovel, S. Croce/Križ, Aurisina/Nabrežina, and Duino/Devin, then represented the “Slovene coast.” Koper/Capodistria, Piran/Pirano, Izola/Isola, and other coastal towns that today are part of the Republic of Slovenia were mostly Italian, just as the previously mentioned villages were predominantly Slovene. As a result of changed political borders after the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Italian-Yugoslav conflict, and the later disintegration of Yugoslavia, today these are parts of Italy and Slovenia, respectively.

22 Jadranska zarja, 3 October 1869, 1.

23 Negrelli, Giorgio, “Trieste nel mito [Trieste/Trst in the Myth],” Storia d'Italia. Il Friuli – Venezia Giulia. II [History of Italy: The Friuli–Venezia Giulia. II]. (Torino, 2002)Google Scholar, 1353; Verginella, Marta, “Mit o slovenskem Trstu, [The Myth of a Slovene Trieste/Trst]” Goriški letnik [Gorica Yearbook] 30/31 (2005): 94–96Google Scholar.

24 A more recent edition of the map is Kozler, Peter, Zemljovid slovenske dežele in pokrajin [Map of Slovene Lands and Provinces] (Ljubljana, 1995)Google Scholar.

25 Wörsdörfer, Visioni germaniche, 190–91.

26 “To see the sea for the first time! How many of our fellow-countrymen, hermetically sealed into the hard frame of mountains, who sat inside that frame from their births to their deaths, have never been granted this joy? The idea of something infinitely broad and unfathomable, a conception of eternity itself, floated through our minds. The sea! The sea!” Bracewell, Wendy, Orientations. An Anthology of East European Travel Writing, ca. 1550–2000 (Budapest, 2009)Google Scholar, 163.

27 Wörsdörfer, Visioni germaniche, 192.

28 Cited in Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar, 105; cf. Dorsi, Pierpaolo, “La colletività di lingua tedesca. [The German-Speaking Community]” in Storia economica e sociale di Trieste, vol. 1, ed. Finzi, Roberto et al. , 547–71 (Trieste, 2001)Google Scholar.

29 Among the most illustrative examples is the Slovene-Czech memorandum published during World War I by political leaders Anton Korošec and František Staněk, in which they opposed “Germanization and German invasion of the Adriatic Sea.” Slovenski narod, 8 May 1918, 1.

30 Panjek, Giovanni, “La Cassa di Risparmio e il mercato del credito a Trieste, [The Cassa di Risparmio and the Credit Market in Trieste/Trst]” in La Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste 1842–2002 [The Cassa di Risparmio in Trieste/Trst 1842–2002], ed. Apollonio, Almerigo et al. , 99–136 (Roma-Bari, 2004)Google Scholar; see also Giudice, Giuseppe Lo, Trieste, l'Austria ed il canale di Suez [Trieste/Trst, Austria and the Suez Canal] (Catania, 1979)Google Scholar.

31 Nečas, Ctibor, “Na pragu češko-slovenskih finančnih stikov, [On the Threshold of the Czech-Slovene Financial Relations]” Zgodovinski časopis [Historical Review] 43, no. 1 (1989): 49–57Google Scholar.

32 For a general insight into banking in the Habsburg Empire before World War I, see Michel, Bernard, Banques & banquiers en Autriche au debut du 20' siecle [Banks and Bankers in Austria at the Beginning of the 20th Century] (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar. On the growing importance of Czech banking trusts in Southern and Central Europe, see also: Nečas, Na pragu [On the Threshold]; Nečas, Podnikání českých bank v cizině 1898–1918 [The Business of Czech Banks Abroad 1898–1918] (Brno,1993); Nečas, , “Zahraniční angažmá bankovního koncernu Sporobanky, [The International Engagement of the Sporobanka]” Sborník prací Filozofické fakulty brněnské Univerzity [Proceedings of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Brno] 40 (1993): 81–92Google Scholar; and Horejsek, Jaroslav, “Kapitálová expanze Živnostenské banky do jihovýchodní Evropy v letech 1907–1918 [The Captial Expansion of the Živnostenská Banka to Southeastern Europe in the Years 1907–1918],” Historica XV. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomoucensis (Prague, 1971)Google Scholar.

33 Michel, Banques & banquiers, 75.

34 Kosatík, Pavel, Bankéř první republiky. Život Jaroslava Preisse [The Banker of the First Republic: The Life of Jaroslav Preiss] (Prague, 1996)Google Scholar, 32.

35 “une des positions dominantes du capital slave dans sa lutte contre la pénétration allemande.” Michel, Banques & banquiers, 75.

36 Despite the growing influence of a “Slavic” economy in Trieste, it would be erroneous to consider a “Slavic” economy to be a homogeneous unit, somehow in competition with allegedly homogeneous German and Italian economic units. More detailed studies are necessary, but a distinction has to be made between the plans of the Jadranska banka, which initially could not be understood as an attempted “economic conquest” of Trieste/Trst, and the efforts of the Živnostenská banka, which were supported by a much more solid and developed financial network and that viewed Trieste/Trst as a focus for Czech advances in the southern parts of the Habsburg state; cf. Michel, Banques & banquiers, 75; Sapelli, Giulio, Trieste italiana. Mito e destino economico [Italian Trieste: Myth and Economic Destiny] (Milan, 1990)Google Scholar, 30; Verginella, Marta, “Sloveni a Trieste tra Sette e Ottocento. Da comunità etnica a minoranza nazionale [Slovenes in Trieste/Trst in the 18th and 19th Centurues: From Ethnic Community to National Minority]” in Storia economica e sociale di Trieste, vol. I, ed. Finzi, , Panjek, , 441–81 (Trieste, 2001)Google Scholar; Pahor, Milan, Jadranska banka v Trstu [Jadranska Bank in Trieste/Trst] (Trst, 1996)Google Scholar, 24.

37 Hlas Adrie, 1 March 1911, 1.

38 Edinost, 14 December 1910, 3.

39 Edinost, 14 March 1911, 3.

40 Edinost, 14 March 1911, 3. Despite the short-lived nature of the yacht club, its establishment conveyed a powerful symbolic charge and represented a concrete, almost “physical” appropriation of the Adriatic Sea.

41 Edinost, 8 November 1911, 1.

42 For more about this topic, see Klabjan, Borut, Češkoslovaška na Jadranu [Czechoslovakia on the Adriatic] (Koper, 2007)Google Scholar.

43 Pleterski, Janko, Prva odločitev Slovencev za Jugoslavijo [The First Decision of Slovenes for Yugoslavia] (Ljubljana, 1971)Google Scholar; Paulová, Milada, Tajný výbor Maffie a spolupráce s Jihoslovany v letech 1916–1918 [The Secret Committee Mafia and Their Collaboration with the Yugoslavs in the Years 1916–1918] (Prague, 1968)Google Scholar. For a longer perspective, see also Rusinow, Dennison, Italy's Austrian Heritage, 1919–1946 (Oxford, 1969)Google Scholar.

44 Extracts from Masaryk cited in Galandauer, Jan, Vznik Československé republiky 1918. Programy, projekty, perspektivy [The Rise of the Czechoslovak Republic 1918: Programs, Projects, Prospectives] (Prague, 1988), 271–72Google Scholar.

45 Lederer, Ivo, La Jugoslavia dalla conferenza della Pace al Trattato di Rapallo [Yugoslavia from the Peace Conference to the Rapallo Treaty] (Milan, 1966)Google Scholar; Valiani, Leo, La dissoluzione dell'Austria-Ungheria [The Dissolution of Austria-Hungary] (Milan, 1966)Google Scholar; Caccamo, Francesco, L'Italia e la “Nuova Europa” [Italy and the New Europe] (Milan, 2000)Google Scholar.

46 On the Adriatic issue, see Jeri, Janko, “1918 in jadransko vprašanje, [1918 and the Adriatic Question]” Sodobnost XXXVII, nos. 5, 6/7 (1989): 531–43Google Scholar, 664–80; idem., “1918 in jadransko vprašanje [1918 and the Adriatic Question],” Sodobnost XXXVIII, nos. 5, 6/7 (1990): 539–47Google Scholar, 708–18; Krizman, Bogdan, “Saveznički ultimatum u Jadranskom pitanju siječnja 1920. godine, [Allied Ultimatum in the Adriatic Question in January 1920]” Jadranski zbornik II (1957): 199–236Google Scholar; Monzali, Luciano, Italiani di Dalmazia. Dal Risorgimento alla Grande Guerra [Italians of Dalmatia: From Risorgimento to the Great War] (Firenze, 2004), 275–313Google Scholar; Toscano, Mario, Il Patto di Londra [The London Pact] (Bologna, 1934)Google Scholar; Marjanović, Marjan, Londonski ugovor iz godine 1915 [The London Pact in 1915] (Zagreb 1960)Google Scholar; Melchionni, Maria Grazia, “La politica estera di Carlo Sforza nel 1920–21, [The Foreign Policy of Carlo Sforza in 1920–21]” Rivista di studi politici internazionali [Journal for International Political Studies] XXXVI, no. 4 (1969): 537–70Google Scholar; Bracco, Barbara, Carlo Sforza e la questione adriatica [Carlo Sforza and the Adriatic Question] (Milan, 1998), 73–100Google Scholar.

47 Among the earliest ones certainly was Randi, Oscar, L'Adriatico. Studio geografico, storico e politico [The Adriatic: A Geographical, Historical and Political Study] (Milan, 1914)Google Scholar; Tamaro, Attilio, L'Adriatico golfo d'Italia [The Adriatic Gulf of Italy] (1915)Google Scholar; Tamaro, , Italiani e Slavi nell'Adriatico (Rome, 1915)Google Scholar; Iverardi, Giuseppe, Per l'italianità geografica del Quarnaro [For the Geographical Italianità of the Quarnaro] (Rome, 1915)Google Scholar; Cassi, Gellio, Il mare Adriatico. Sua funzione attraverso i tempi [The Adriatic Sea: Its Function Through Time] (Milan, 1915)Google Scholar. Cassi's book's motto is D'Annunzio's verse from the poem “La Nave:” “Dear Lord, redeem the Adriatic! Free the Adriatic to your people! Homeland to the Veneti the whole Adriatic!”

48 See also the map in Senator, 'Italicus, La question de L'Adriatique [The Adriatic Question] (Rome, 1916)Google Scholar.

49 Among the earliest publications, see Manifestations Yougoslaves contre L'imperialisme Italien [Yugoslav Manifestations Against Italian Imperialism] (Paris, 1919)Google Scholar, or the texts in the Yugoslav newspaper intended for an Italian readership L'Adriatico Jugoslavo, e.g., 29 March 1919, 1. On Slovene hopes placed in American President Wilson and their later disappointment, see Lipušček, Uroš, Ave Wilson. ZDA in prekrajanje Slovenije v Versaillesu 1919–1920 [USA and the Division of Slovenia at Versailles] (Ljubljana, 2003)Google Scholar.

50 Cvijić, Jovan, La péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine [The Balkan Peninsula: Human Geography] (Paris, 1918)Google Scholar; cf. also Baskar, Bojan, Dvoumni Mediteran [Ambiguous Mediterranean] (Koper, 2002), 55–58Google Scholar.

51 Among numerous publications whose purpose was convincing the international public of the “Yugoslav nature” of the eastern Adriatic, see Il litorale jugoslavo dell'Adriatico [The Yugoslav Littoral of the Adriatic] (Zagreb, 1919)Google Scholar.

52 On D'Annuzio's adventure within the framework of the Adriatic issue, see a slightly out-of-date but still clear Alatri, Paolo, Nitti, D'Annunzio e la questione adriatica (1919–1920) [D'Annunzio and the Adriatic Question (1919–1920)] (Milan, 1959)Google Scholar.

53 Novak, Grga, Naše more [Our Sea] (Zagreb, 1932)Google Scholar, 282.

54 The Position of the Yugoslav Minority in Italy (Ljubljana, 1927), 5.

55 Slanc, Karl, Avstrijski Jugoslovani in morje [Austrian Yugoslavs and the Sea] (Gorica, 1912)Google Scholar.

56 Among others, see Hametz, Maura, “The Carabinieri Stood by: The Italian state and the “Slavic Threat” in Trieste, 1919–1922,” Nationalities Papers 29, no. 4 (2001): 559–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Rodoljubka, K obletnici 13. julija, (Jadranka, I., 7, mali srpan 1921), 6–7.

58 Debevec, Jože, “Jadransko morje in italijanski pesniki [Adriatic Sea and Italian Poets] Dom in svet 32, nos. 3–6 (1919): 175–76Google Scholar.

59 Tone Seliškar, Morje plaka [The Sea Cries] (Ljubljana, 1920). For the politicization of the commemorative practices and rituals of the Slovene and Croat emigrés in Yugoslavia in the interwar period, see Pelikan, Egon, “Komemorativne prakse slovenskih emigrantov iz Julijske krajine v Dravski banovini, [Commemorative Practices of Slovene Emigrees from the Julian March in the Drava Banate]” Acta Histriae 18, no. 3 (2010): 453–70Google Scholar. For an analysis of commemorations in the Littoral region in the first years after World War I, see my “Nation and Commemoration in the Adriatic. The Commemoration of the Italian Unknown Soldier in a Multinational Area: The Case of the Former Austrian Littoral,” Acta Histriae 18, no. 3 (2010): 399–424Google Scholar.

60 Schulze, Hagen, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar, 232. On the “exodus” of Croats from the area acquired by Italy after the war, see Talijanska uprava i egzodus Hrvata 1918–1943 [Italian Administration and the Exodus of the Croats, 1918–1943] (Zagreb, 2001)Google Scholar.

61 The booklet was published for propaganda purposes in the Czech language, given that it was intended for the Czech readership. Jihoslovansko-italská otázka [Yugoslav-Italian Question] (Prague, 1919), 10.

62 Stuhlpfarrer, Karl, “Trieste e Austria. Il primo lustro del secondo dopoguerra, [Trieste/Trst and Austria: The First Five Years After World War II]” Acta Histriae VI (1998): 254–55Google Scholar.

63 Archiv Národního muzea Prague, Fond Odon Pára, box 6, folder Konec Rakouska v Terstu 1918 [End of Austria in Trieste 1918].

64 Memorandum record of the Czech-Slovak Maritime Board in Trieste on the “needs of Czech-Slovak nations for access to sea navigation, and all other needs.” Archiv ministerstva zahraničních věcí Prague, Fond ZÚ Taliansko, GK Terst 1918–1939, box 7, file no. 25, 20. 10. 1918, “Pamětní spis o potřebách národa československého pro přístup k moři, pro plavbu námořní a ve věcech osadních” [Memorandum of the Needs of the Czechoslovak Nation for the Access to the Sea, for Maritime Navigation and for Settlers' Questions].

65 Dejmek, Jindřich and Kolář, František, Československo na paříšké mírové konferenci 1918–1920. Dokumenty československé zahraniční politiky [Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference, 1918–1920: Documents of Czechoslovak Foreign Policy], Vol. I. (Prague, 2001)Google Scholar, 157; cf. Chervin, Arthur, Da Prague a L'Adriatique [From Prague to the Adriatic] (Paris, 1919)Google Scholar.

66 Borut Klabjan, Češkoslovaška, 223–53.

67 Zucconi, Guido, Una città cosmopolita. Fiume e il suo fronte-mare nell'età dualistica (1870–1914) [A Cosmopolitan City: Rijeka/Fiume and its Waterfront in the Dualistic Time (1870–1914)] (Rome, 2008)Google Scholar, 24.

68 Gianluca Volpi, “Fiumani, ungheresi, italiani, [Fiumani, Hungarians, Italians]” in Nazionalismi, ed. Cattaruzza, 47–72; Fried, Ilona, Fiume città della memoria 1868–1945 [Rijeka/Fiume City of Memory 1868–1945] (Udine, 2005)Google Scholar, 27.

69 Zucconi, Una città, 10.

70 Sondhaus, Naval Policy, 188.

71 For a discussion of the concept of “cosmopolitanism” in Mediterranean port-cities, see Driessen, Henk, “Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered,” History and Anthropology 16, no. 1 (March 2005): 129–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 For a comparative dimension of the development of Adriatic port-cities, see Lawton, Richard and Lee, Robert eds., Population and Society in Western European Port-Cities c. 1650–1939 (Liverpool, 2002)Google Scholar.

73 Trattato di pace con l'Austria ed atti connessi [Peace Treaty with Austria and Connected Acts] (Rome, 1919)Google Scholar.

74 Trieste und Fiume im Weltverkehre (Vienna-Prague-Budapest, 1930)Google Scholar, 33.

75 Wladimir, Kwiatkowski, Trieste e la sua importanza per il commercio con la Polonia [Trieste/Trst and its Importance for the Trade with Poland] (Trieste, Tip, 1924), 16–21Google Scholar. For an attempt at comparative analysis of the Littoral and Galicia, see Franzinetti, Guido, “The Austrian Littoral in a Cisleithanian perspective,” Acta Histriae 14, no. 1 (2006): 1–13Google Scholar.

76 Baud, Michiel, Van Schendel, Willem, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (Fall, 1997): 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 On the fluidity and compactness of the Adriatic, see Emilio Cocco, “I territori liquidi. Forme e confini di un immaginario adriatico, [The Liquid Territories: Forms and Borders of an Adriatic Imagery]” in Immaginare l'Adriatico, ed. Cocco and Minardi, 11–24.

78 For an attempt at conceptualizing a-nationality, see Zahra, Tara, “Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69 (Spring 2010): 93–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London, 1995 [1902])CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Alessio, Vanni, Il cuore conteso [The Contested Heart] (Naples, 2003)Google Scholar. On the history of Istra/Istria, see Darovec, Darko, Kratka zgodovina Istre [A Brief History of Istria] (Koper, 2009)Google Scholar.

80 Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries. The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar, 271; cf. Darovec, Vida Rožac, “Narod, država in identitete v obmejnih prostorih, [Nation, State, and Identities in Border Spaces]” Acta Histriae 18, nos. 1–2 (2010): 217–28Google Scholar.

81 Vivante, Angelo, Irredentismo adriatico. Contributo alla discussione sui rapporti austro-italiani [Adriatic Irredentism: Contributions to the Discussion on the Austro-Italian Relations] (Firenze, 1912)Google Scholar.

82 Iordachi, Constantin, “‘Entangled Histories:’ Re-writing the History of Central and Southeastern Europe from a Relational Perspective,” European Studies/Etudes Européennes/Europaïchen Studien 4, (April 2004): 1–24Google Scholar.