Week 59

 

During the previous weeks we have focused – if we can say so – on the theme of the Italian “mutilated victory”, from the origin of the name and the related concept, to its role in the internal conflict between the “democratic” and “national” fractions of interventionism. Furthermore we have reviewed the general set up of the Treaty of London, its diplomatic context and background, that draws back to the Italian foreign policy lines established around the second decade post unification (within the frame of the protectionist choice of 1878-87 and the early colonial experiences) – especially, we have returned a few times to the difference in the approach to the idea of nation between the nationalist forces proper and the liberal “democratic” forces which both recognized how the rise and development of the idea of nationalities would play a decisive factor in the post Great War European system.

This detour ends now with the conclusive part of our path: a closer look at the arguments behind the two ideas of nation, applied to the concrete example of the “Adriatic question” around 1918-19. We have already introduced Gaetano Salvemini and Carlo Maranelli's La questione Adriatica last week, and we'll focus now on the specific arguments of this work, expression of the Italian “democratic interventionism”, moving on later to those of the “national interventionism”. In this context, we'll probably pay more attention to the idea that the policies of a nation should in their perfect form – abstracting from their contingent elements – reflect a core of absolute elements; a theme, that of conforming the political organisms of a nation to its deeper, natural character, that would continue to enjoy a certain popularity in Italy (and other European nations) during the following years.

As some of the analyzed sources will suggest, we could have started further back in time, around mid XIX when the concrete affirmation of the new national states of Italy and Germany had inspired a prominent attention to what had been before in large part only a literary fascination. To investigate then what a nation was, and by what means it came to be and to exert its action, and what principles regulated and determined its foundations – for the ultimate purpose to establish its legitimacy in and of itself. A sort of phenomenology of the nation, which a certain fringe of the nationalists – to borrow some more from Hegel – would eventually drive to the same absurd of the phrenologists, to claim that the true essence of the nation was its ground.

 

Salvemini and Maranelli opened their discussion with an examination of the results of the famous last census of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (that of the omnipresent map – with groups divided on the basis of primary language, or “custom language”), which I am reproducing here as they were given in La questione Adriatica - and hopefully we'll get some use out of them.

Region of Gorizia	Population	German	Slovene	Serb-Croat	Italian	Other
Gorizia (urban)	30,995	3,236	10,782	78	14,838	372
Gorizia (suburban)	73,861	350	70,014	23	2,769	101
Gradisca	34,155	390	4,660	2	26,269	9
Monfalcone	53,010	237	1,693	11	45,933	12
Cesiano	30,461	146	29,496	69	343	23
Tolmino	38,239	122	37,892	4	29	26
-----------------------	--------------	----------	--------------	-------------	----------	--------
Total	260,721	4,481	154,537	187	90,181	543

Region of Istria	Population	German	Slovene	Serb-Croat	Italian	Other
Capodistria (entire)	89,393	322	31,895	17,573	38,010	62
Volosca (entire)	54,472	2,399	17,395	30,382	955	229
Parenzo (entire)	61,358	80	1,962	17,031	41,274	21
Rovigno (urban)	12,323	320	63	58	10,865	9
Pola (urban)	50,291	9,067	3,298	9,507	26,784	1,635
Pola (suburban)	94,983	542	376	21,007	14,043	83
Pisino (entire)	48,518	92	291	42,877	4,029	916
Veglia (entire)	21,259	25	29	19,533	1,543	5
Lussin (entire)	21,260	422	98	9,998	9,883	50
-----------------------	--------------	----------	--------------	-------------	----------	--------
Total	403,566	13,279	55,407	167,966	147,386	3,010

Here and in the following I'll usually refer to localities by the name used in Italian publications of the time; both for consistency with the excerpts and for reasons of pure convenience. It should go without saying, given the arguments covered, that this choice is not meant to argue in favor or against the “true natural” identity of those localities.

What one can immediately derive from the data – regardless of their accuracy, which is in certain cases debatable – is a confirmation of a tendency to “clustering” of the local populations with a few centers presenting a character of marked “ethnic definition”. The centers of Tolmino and Cesiano with a large Slovene majority, while Gradisca and Monfalcone with a large Italian one. Gorizia, the traditional administrative center, had a significant presence of German functionaries and was otherwise marked by the traditional Italian prevalence in the urban centers and Slovene and Croat prevalence in the rural areas (a reflex of the supposed “backwardness” of the Slavic populations – but it should be noted that universal male suffrage had yet to be introduced or had been introduced very recently in many of the contested regions, so that the idea that wealthy and well educated citizens had the right to play a larger political role was far from a remote one). Unfortunately, those regions did not lend themselves to a good line of defined nationality (if you are understandably perplexed about the geography of the region, you can check this mid XIX Century map with the old administrative regions) – you can see Salvemini's reconstruction of the Italian zones in page 9 of the linked pdf and a further ethnographic subdivision according to the old census of 1880. Far from following the more reasonable lines that one attempted to trace along watersheds or river courses, the ethnic groups folded back and forth over each other, and that without even considering the extremely common pattern of seasonal work that led to recurrent emigration and population exchange over the Austrian and Italian border in the 1870-1914 period. So that not only the supposed natural borders of Italy were a far cry from any application of the principle of nationalities, but even a mindful application of such principle was destined to leave significant zones of mixed population.

Consider the case of Gorizia. This city, with around 31 thousand residents, counted according to the 1910 Austrian census a 40.57% of Italians, a 36,84% of Slovenes and a 11.05% of Germans. […] As for the proportions between Italians and Slovenes, it is likely more favorable to the Italians than the official statistics may let one believe. In Austria, in those lands contested between different nationalities, the […] census always adds to the relative size of […] the one which presided to the census operations. In the present case, the nationality favored by the Austrian Government was the Slovene one, which handled the census operations in place of the Italian municipal administration.

The tendency of the Austrian authorities to favor one nationality against another, for the purpose of maintaining the supervision and mediation role of the central administration, as well as encouraging changes in the relative size of the different populations are attested. And Salvemini gives the data of the 1900 census (16,112 Italians and 4,754 Slovenes recorded) to support his argument; which would imply a growth of the Slovene urban population by over 85% in ten years, within a general growth of the regional population of 5.04%. A process that would not have been impossible in light of the large basin of rural population that was available for immigration into the urban center, but which still casts some doubts over the reliability of both the 1900 and 1910 census. This sort of considerations were one of the reasons behind the reluctance to take the census results at face value in the matter of establishing the relative majority of nationalities (and in addition we should always remember that these were not inquiries over the self-identification of the population, but only over their tongue of use). Another one was how to adjust those supposed lines of nationality to take into account certain practical matters: if one population was more present in the rural areas and the other one in the urban centers, how to split those regions without creating the risk of an immediate economical backlash for zones that were clearly interdependent? If a region had one well established administrative center, was one nation going to lose entirely its places of governance, of business, of trade? If the border ran through a region of workers mobility (seasonal or more frequent), what measures were to be taken to safeguard the occupation of those workers and protect them from the consequences of possible tariffs and restrictions on movement?