Abstract
Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.
Highlights
Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies
The newly formed neighbourly relations led to the ambitious project that, with the candidacy of GoriziaNova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025, would like to break the last barrier still existing to separate the Italian and Slovenian ethnic groups, that is, the spoken language.: “This konfin is about challenging the Babylon tower in the land of so many languages, about all our codes of communication: body language, digital language, sign language, clown language
Far from representing a folkloristic cultural heritage of anthropological interest, what has recently occurred in the cross-border territory of Gorizia, whose foundations are rooted in the myth of Mitteleuropa, is of capital importance: the candidacy of Gorizia as European Capital of Culture 2025 is a call to Europe and the whole world
Summary
Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. Nova Gorica was founded in 1948, when, following the peace treaties after the Second World War, the border divided the city of Gorizia in two, and the eastern part of the city was assigned to Yugoslavia.
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