Border regions and identity

Frankfurt am Meer: The “Illiberal” Liberalism of the German Confederation and Its Aspirations over the Habsburg Adriatic in 1848

“…1 This process is concomitant with the appropriation of the Venetian colonial past on the part of Italian imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century (Laven and Damien 2015). As Will Hanley (2017, 28) put it with regard to late nineteenth-century Alexandria, a context that in many respects resembled that of Trieste and the other port cities of the eastern Mediterranean, “the cardinal sin of histories of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism is pleasure in the anachronistic use of present-day categories, especially those of modular and indelible nationality.” Pier Paolo Dorsi (1996, 116–117), for example, wrote that “between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Trieste was the pole of attraction mainly of the Italian people of the Adriatic, more than for peoples that were more removed in culture and traditions,” arguing teleologically that there existed a relatively homogenous Italian culture “from Friuli to Apulia.” Yet in the Austrian Littoral, a regional shared sense of belonging existed irrespective of present-day national categorizations and intertwined with Mitteleuropa and the eastern Adriatic (Laven and Baycroft 2008). As David Laven (2014), Dominique Kirchner Reill (2012), and Konstantina Zanou (2018) have shown, to speak of an Italian culture in the mid-nineteenth-century Adriatic (and even in later decades) is anachronistic, notwithstanding the fact that nationalist and municipalist political figures of Trieste identified with the Italian “nation,” albeit for different purposes.…”

“…Pier Paolo Dorsi (1996, 116-117), for example, wrote that "between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Trieste was the pole of attraction mainly of the Italian people of the Adriatic, more than for peoples that were more removed in culture and traditions," arguing teleologically that there existed a relatively homogenous Italian culture "from Friuli to Apulia." Yet in the Austrian Littoral, a regional shared sense of belonging existed irrespective of present-day national categorizations and intertwined with Mitteleuropa and the eastern Adriatic (Laven and Baycroft 2008). As David Laven (2014), Dominique Kirchner Reill (2012), and Konstantina Zanou (2018 have shown, to speak of an Italian culture in the midnineteenth-century Adriatic (and even in later decades) is anachronistic, notwithstanding the fact that nationalist and municipalist political figures of Trieste identified with the Italian "nation," albeit for different purposes.…”

Language, Regional Identity and the Failure of the Left in the Moselle Département, 1871-1936

“…'Liminal and often contested spaces, zones of cross-cultural fertilization and conflict, of exchange and rejection, over the last decade, border regions and marginal territories have become central to research on identity' write David Laven and Timothy Baycroft in a recent study on borders and regional identities. 1 Yet despite the growing number of scholarly studies on regional identities within a historical context, the Moselle, located in the north-eastern corner of France, has been largely ignored by historians and remains one of Europe's least familiar border regions. Either presented in general accounts as French or a mere extension of Alsace, with which it shared a common past in Germany's Reichsland between 1871 and 1918, the Moselle has received very little scholarly attention.…”