Bordering and memorializing the Northern Adriatic and Central Europe : introductory notes on Borderlands of memory (original) (raw)
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The Upper Adriatic borderland: From conflict to harmony
GeoJournal, 2000
The paper presents an overview of the Upper Adriatic as a contact area between different cultural, social, economic and political entities, producing potential conflicts in the last century. The first part of the 20th century represented a classic example of geopolitical conflict through two World Wars and their related Peace Conferences that deeply impacted the region. Conflicts arising from the mid-century solution of the Trieste question transformed the Upper Adriatic into a laboratory of contemporary political geographic transformation. Changing geopolitical patterns have also modified the political, social and ethnic construction of the Upper Adriatic. The process of creating new international boundaries in the region ended in 1991 with the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. Through these geopolitical transformations in the Upper Adriatic, new political geographic attitudes evolved. Early on, Ratzel's geopolitical principles of defining borders as power barometers between neighbors dominated. More recently, attitudes have reflected modern integrative ideas with a focus on looking for harmony and the elimination of international conflicts. Greater attention has thus been given to the political geography of 'everyday life', inter-ethnic relations, and cross-border contacts. Hence, 'new' borderlands of the Upper Adriatic are more receptive to integration because they seek to overcome conflicts caused by the division of traditionally homogeneous spaces as local level political and ideological hindrances disappear. The region divided among Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia is becoming a new and special type of European borderland in the new century.
Matvejević's vision of the porous boundaries of the Mediterranean accords with a common view of seas as spaces of both literal and metaphorical uidity, as media that confound e orts to draw rigid boundaries. Of late, watery metaphors have proven popular among theorists seeking to characterize the globalized post-Cold War order in terms that capture ux and mobility. Stefan Helmreich, for instance, deems water a "theory machine" for contemporary anthropology. 4 Zygmunt Bauman has gone so far as to de ne a new phase of modernity as "liquid, " expressed in his belief that " ' uidity' or 'liquidity' [are] tting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity. " 5 Despite the vogue for using watery metaphors to capture the uidity of the globalized world, along the contemporary Adriatic understandings of actual (rather than metaphorical) seawater suggest that sites of literal uidity may not necessarily be sites of uid or elastic understandings of territory. Since 1992, I have conducted eld research in varied locales in the northeastern Adriatic, ranging from Trieste (Italy) to Piran (Slovenia) to Savudrija, Rovinj, and Lošinj (Croatia). I have investigated topics ranging from memories of the post-1945 exodus from the Istrian peninsula a er it passed from Italian to Yugoslav control, to contemporary debates over privatization along the Croatian coast, to e orts to establish a marine protected area o the island of Lošinj. In all of these examples I have found that the sea gures prominently as a marker of identity and that inhabitants of the region o en conceive of the sea not so much as a uid space but as one delimited by boundaries, a vision embodied in cartographic representations of the Adriatic cut through by the rigid vectors of state borders.
Journal of Borderland Studies, 2018
Historically located at the crossroads of multiple political entities, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has been constructed as a European borderland. Since the war of the 1990s, its ethnic and religious diversity has been framed as a security threat. European institutions and Member States are politically, economically and military involved in the state-building and reconciliation processes, set as part of BiH’s path towards the Union. In 2014, Sarajevo was placed at the “heart of Europe” in the opening commemoration of the First World War organized by European embassies and their Bosnian partners. The official narrative that pledged for a century of peace after the century of wars suggested the positive impact of European integration on BiH’s violent past. However, local activists claimed divergent interpretations, be it from a nationalist, anti-imperialist or emancipatory perspective. While the commemoration exulted national divisions, it contributed to the construction of BiH as an unstable borderland, which needs to be pacified. Relying on memory and border studies, this article demonstrates that the attempt to institutionalize a pacified memory of the war resulted in legitimizing the European institutions’ domination over Bosnian polity. In fine, it shows how memory politics participates in the securitization of a European borderland.
National state borders and ethnic boundaries in Istria and the North East Adriatic
Anthropological Notebooks, 2019
This paper explores ethnic, cultural and symbolic boundaries in a micro-region within the Mediterranean area of Istria, which is conceptualised as a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual region. In scholarly writings and everyday speech, it is seen as a border zone where people construct multiple pure and hybrid identities. In this paper, I intend to explore some of the geographic, historical, political, and anthropological discourses that are present in the fieldwork location of Istria and North East Adriatic Sea as well as address the issue of national land and maritime borders and ethnic boundaries. I will focus on the border issues in the periods of political and ideological changes after World War II and after 1991, in the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of Slovenia and Croatia as new post-socialist states. Particular focus will be on the issue of international arbitrage on the maritime and land border in 2017.
Chasing the Specters, Dodging the Ghosts: Borders and the Processes of Europeanization in Croatia
Sociologija i prostor, 2024
This article analyzes discursive bordering practices in the processes of Europeanization in Croatia. It attempts to inscribe a border-related, anthropologically seated notion of tidemarks more firmly within the research on symbolic geographies of the Balkans. The article provides an overview of spatial imagining and (re)bordering of the Balkans and Europe, and it discusses metaphors that accompany those formations, such as bulwarks, bridges, or crossroads. Then, examples from long-term empirical research on the perception of the European Union in Croatia are analyzed through the lens of tidemarks. The analysis includes interviews with negotiators with the EU, students of the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb, union leader in the region of Međimurje, as well as the speech delivered by Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanović at the ceremony marking the country’s accession to the EU. In conclusion, the article proposes that discerning the varying historical and ideological meanings of tidemarks within the realm of symbolic geography deepens the understanding of the European Union and processes of Europeanization in general.
2013
Considering borders as the limit of the States' sovereignty and territorial competency is not enough. During the past thirty years, more and more authors have shown the necessity to take into account the complexity of the processes related to the border issue and have called for a postmodern perspective 1. This theoretical approach will constitute our basis for observing border reconfigurations in the Balkans. The border, being a separation line between two entities, has a boundary dimension. At the same time, it is an interface, a contact zone that regulates cross-border transfers and supports hybridisations. Borders, in particular states' borders, are politically, historically and socially built 2 : Their form and their path reflect specific periods and configurations. It is essential to understand this time-related aspect and to put into perspective the way borders are constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and the symbolic part attached to these processes 3. As Anssi Paasi and David Newman stated, "State boundaries are equally social, political and discursive constructs, not just static naturalized categories located between states. Boundaries and their meanings are historically contingent, and they are part of the production and institutionalization of territories and territoriality" 4. These re-and de-bordering processes are particularly observable in the Balkans region since the fall of socialist regimes and the beginning of the European integration period. Thus, borders may and should be observed as a dialectic issue. If they constitute political, institutional and legal boundaries, they should also be considered as limits and contact zones between-at least-two material and ideal space that influence socio-spatial relations between groups and individuals. At the symbolical level, referring to the border implies referring to the Other, its history, its territory. Thus, the territories play a strategic role for the definition and differentiation of territorial identities. The duality of borders, representing both boundaries and interfaces, results in the existence of two territories with the appearance of borderlands duplicated on each side of the line 5. In fact, borderlands are included in the national territory contributing to its definition while being a periphery of it. More precisely, the latter are located at the territorial and
Europeanisation And Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (Introduction)
Palgrave, 2021
This volume explores how the process of European integration has influenced collective memory in the countries of the Western Balkans. In the region, there is still no shared understanding of the causes (and consequences) of the Yugoslav wars. The conflicts of the 1990s but also of WWII and its aftermath have created “ethnically confined” memory cultures. As such, divergent interpretations of history continue to trigger confrontations between neighboring countries and hinder the creation of a joint EU perspective. In this volume, the authors examine how these “memory wars” impact the European dimension - by becoming a tool to either support or oppose Europeanisation. The contributors focus on how and why memory is renegotiated, exhibited, adjusted, or ignored in the Europeanisation process.