Changing History: Ethnic Identity Management in Trieste

Abstract

The Trieste region on the northern Adriatic has for centuries been at the crossroads of Roman, Slavic and Germanic influence. Ethnic demarcation and ethnic conflict, especially between Italians and Slovenes, are said to be among the few things that have made for continuity in Trieste’s dynamic history.1 Today’s ethnic tensions between these two groups are in turn often explained as a ‘logical’ result and a burdensome heritage from the past. In the last decades, however, social scientists have increasingly pointed out that not only does the past influence the present, but the past is also continuously reconstructed in the present. History and social memory are understood as selective ‘retroactive representations of pastness’ (Tonkin 1990: 27), in which remembrance and oblivion are equally important elements in the construction of present and future group identities and intergroup relationships. If the ethnic conflict in Trieste is experienced as unchanged (and therefore in fact as unchangeable), this opens up the question not only of the processes of ‘silences, erasures, preferences, exaggerations’ (Trouillot 1990: 19) involved in this perception, but also of what role this ‘history of conflict’ plays in Trieste’s present ethnic relations.