From bridge to border
Subtitle: Adriatic multi-nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice
By: Dominique Kirchner Reill
Series: Stanford studies on Central and Eastern Europe; Stanford studies on Central and Eastern Europe
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Stanford, California
Language: eng
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780804774468
Copyright date: 2012
Subjects: Cultural pluralism; Nationalism; History
Description: We can often learn as much from political movements that failed as from those that achieved their goals. Nationalists Who Feared the Nation looks at one such frustrated movement: a group of community leaders and writers in Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s who proposed the creation of a multinational zone surrounding the Adriatic Sea. At the time, the lands of the Adriatic formed a maritime community whose people spoke different languages and practiced different faiths but identified themselves as belonging to a single region of the Hapsburg Empire. While these activists hoped that nationhood could be used to strengthen cultural bonds, they also feared nationalism's homogenizing effects and its potential for violence. This book demonstrates that not all nationalisms attempted to create homogeneous, single-language, -religion, or -ethnicity nations. Moreover, in treating the Adriatic lands as one unit, this book serves as a correction to "national" histories that impose our modern view of nationhood on what was a multinational region.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The Adriatic and the romance of national variety; title: Niccolò Tommaseo : progress through multi-nationalism; title: Trieste : the center of a multi-national Adriatic; title: Multi-nationalism in Dalmatia : from a means to an end; title: 1848 : a rupture in experience; title: 1848 : a crisis for multi-nationalism?; title: Conclusion : from bridge to border : the Adriatic in the nineteenth century.