Trieste: Ethnicity and the Cold War, 1945-54

Abstract

In many histories of Trieste the city is located in the south-eastern corner of a geopolitical area comprising northern Italy, Austria and northern Yugoslavia, at the head of the Adriatic Sea, and at the heart of a region known variously as Venezia Giulia, Julijska Krajina, or the Julian March. A Habsburg port in the nineteenth century, Trieste was brought within Italian borders in 1920.' Following the second world war, the liberated city's status was contested by supporters of an independent territory of Trieste, by proItalian nationalists and by pro-Yugoslav communists. Some historians have hailed the political settlement reached in 1954 as a model case of conflict resolution and border delineation.2 Their histories have reduced the complexity of Trieste's post-war political and cultural disarray to the East-West, 'Slav'-Italian, and communistdemocratic oppositions that dominated political and historical assumptions during the Cold War. Moreover, they have propounded the view that 'ethnic identity' should ideally coincide with, and ipso facto legitimate, 'national identity', and that 'self-determination' is best achieved when the boundaries of ethnically-defined territories coincide with those of homonymous nations. When the British-US Allies decided to co-operate with Tito's partisans in the final years of the war to expel nazi forces from areas bordering Yugoslavia and Italy, patriotic Italians were already wary of Tito's communist motives and objectives. As Slovene partisans wrested control of the occupied areas in the region of Trieste, the Slovene Osvobodilna Fronta (OF), or Liberation Front, set up local administrations called Liberation Committees on behalf of Tito's government. Although the Committees enjoyed considerable support in Trieste and surrounding villages, their allegiance with Yugoslavia made them unacceptable to the Allies. The Committees