Staging the Nation in Fascist Italy's “New Provinces”

Abstract

<jats:p>Read any textbook account of interwar Europe, and “indifference to nation” is not likely to figure as a heading. On the contrary, the talk will be of untrammeled nationalist rivalries leading the continent to ruin. In the territories of Eastern and South Eastern Europe that had once been part of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires, we will be reminded, nationalist hatred and border conflicts paved the way to World War I. And in the aftermath of that war, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler took glorification of the national community to new heights, unleashing colonial and continental wars of conquest and annihilation. Small wonder that when many Europeans looked back from the rubble of 1945, what they saw was far too much commitment to nation, not too little. Indeed, the aspiration of many idealists in 1945 was precisely to supersede the nationalist rivalries and affiliations that they saw as so detrimental to peaceful coexistence and to create some kind of supranational European loyalty and structure instead.</jats:p>

The Un-‘Common Sense’ of National Identity: Luigi Molina, Trentini and the Fascist Italianisation Campaign in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol

“…Perhaps, more accurately, where Rome's imaginings of italianità were not compatible with those of residents in Trentino-Alto Adige/ Südtirol, a type of hierarchy of Italian-ness emerged that clearly reflected the fluid process of nationbuilding. 120 As the regime's desire to stabilise Italian control in the territory became more urgent, however, its efforts undermined the ability of local officials like Molina to delineate the parameters of italianità (or at least Italian control) in a region rich with its own cultural and political allegiances that by turns competed and overlapped with the interests of the Italian state. At the same time, Italy's struggles to implement more rigid criteria for Italianisation meant the weakening of officials' moral authority, political support and 'totalitarian' façade in the region and, as a result, the inevitable failure of any sort of campaign to establish political or cultural hegemony in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol.…”

Possibilities and pitfalls of the concept of national indifference

“…1 1 Subsequent authors building further on the concept, include: Bolin and Douglas (2017), Brüggemann and Wezel (2019), Feest (2017), Ficeri (2020), Jakoubek (2018, 2021), Kamusella (2016), Leustean (2018), Lichtenstein (2012), Pergher (2012), Polak‐Springer (2020) and Stergar (2012). …”

The Advantage of Legal Diversity for State Formation: Bourbon Reforms and Aragonese Law in Eighteenth-Century Spain

“…5 A high degree of legal uniformity is considered advantageous in these accounts as it increased the ability of a state to overcome the 'indifference to nation' of its component regions and link local stability to the preservation of the state. 6 New approaches to state formation, however, have begun to suggest that legal diversity could support the development of a state. Philip Gorski has shown that European states have developed along a variety of paths that are in tension with the primary thrust of theories of state formation.…”