ACTA HISTRIAE VI.
received: 1997-12-04	UDC 327(450 Free territory):323.15
323.15:341.222(450:497.1)"1947"
'INVENTING ETHNIC SPACES: 'FREE TERRITORY', SOVEREIGNY AND THE 1947 PEACE TREATY'
Glenda SLUGA University of Sydney, European Studies, AU-Sydney 2006
ABSTRACT
The Free Territory of Trieste was a key objective of the 1947 Peace Treaty. This paper situates the idea of a 'Free Territory', and its failure, in the context of postwar assumptions about ethnically-determined political subjectivity, and ethnically-definable national territory. While the Free Territory experimented with the possibility of creating a non-national geo-political space, the national boundary that was eventually drawn between Italy and Yugoslavia was the product of Cold War Realpolitik, and grounded in images of unyielding national/cultural/political oppositions, the naturalness of racial hatred, and an acceptance of the premise that space can be ethnically determined.
Introduction
My aim in this paper is to reconsider the idea of the Free Territory of Trieste that was a key objective of the 1947 Peace Treaty, not in order to resuscitate that idea as a Utopian solution to the problem of territorial sovereignty, but rather, in order to examine postwar assumptions about ethnically-determined political subjectivity, and ethnically-definable national territory. I want to show how the history of the Free Territory, which in principle grounded sovereignty in citizenship rather than ethnicity, can help us understand the tensions that informed postwar attitudes towards ethnicity, democracy and national sovereignty, and the influence of these tensions on international strategies for drawing national boundaries.
The history of the Boundary Commission appointed by the participants at the international peace talks to resolve the problem of Venezia Giulia in early 1946 is quite well known. Its brief was to document the political preferences of the local population, to adjudicate the mountains of petitions and arguments submitted to it by interested parties, and to pursue their objective of demarcating a boundary which deviated as little as possible from the 'ethnic line' (Duroselle, 1966, 208). In May 1946, after completing a month's field work, the Commission returned to the peace talks with
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four different boundaries, each reflecting the bias of the delegation's state. According to Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, there was very little agreement among the Commission's experts on what even constituted the cultural boundaries of the ethnic identities they were meant to be graphically locating (Duroselle, 1966, 220).1 Despite general acceptance of the idea that territorial sovereignty should be ethnically determined, the British experts concentrated on written documents because they considered observation and interviews of little value to an ethnic 'plan'; thus they assumed that ethnicity could be objectively categorised. The United States' representatives on the other hand found contact with the population more useful, but also examined demographic trends since the Austrian census of 1910; their approach was to combine subjective and objective conceptualisations of ethnicity. The French delegates applied a more expedient and Realpolitik approach. They wanted to balance the number of minorities, and to trace a path mid-way between the American and Russian lines. The Russians, according to Duroselle, were more concerned with ethnic arguments than with 'the will of the people'. 'In fact', Duroselle writes, as far as the Russians were concerned 'if he was of Slav origin and spoke Italian, an inhabitant of the region had to be considered a Slav'. The Russian experts privileged ethnic genealogies, presumably as private histories told by the individual. The question of the 'people's will' and of its relationship to the Commission's search for an 'ethnic line' remained an implicit sub-text in all these approaches, and even in Duroselle's criticisms.
The idea of ethnic territoriality, as it was employed by the Boundary Cómmis-sion's experts, and described in their mission statement, masked the difficulties of determining who the 'people' were; how a 'Slav' could be 'objectively' identified as distinct from an Italian; how changing demographics over time affected the notion of fixed cultural or national boundaries; and how these forms of ethnic identification could be translated not only into a boundary, but into the basis for a democratic polity, expressive of 'the will of the people'.
The Commission's guidelines, its emphasis on an 'ethnic line' meant that the population they were surveying were explicitly invited to ground their arguments for sovereignty in proof of representative italianita, or of 'Slavness'. As existing histories remind us, the arrival of the Boundary commission was met with a flurry of local activity, demonstrations, petition-signing, and pamphleteering, reinventing the possibilities for imagining ethnic spaces in Trieste and Venezia Giulia. Much of this activity involved marking out territory with the signs of national sovereignty, such as
1 Sullivan (1946a) reported March 1946 that the Commission had adopted the 'Report on the ethnic groups in the Venezia Giulia', printed in Rome January 1946, as a common reference work, and the discredited censuses of 1910 and 1921. These usually represented the 'Slav' population of Trieste at around 15% as opposed to the 30% claimed by the pro-Yugoslavs.
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flags, costumes and language. Yet, almost all sides contesting Trieste's identity tempered ethno-national arguments with a desire to stress the limits of nationalism and ethno-national identification. The Commission had even inspired the creation of an Independence Front. Small shopkeepers, and skilled workers who had supported the partisans and the communist Liberation Council during the war and immediately after, now rallied to the cause of an independent Triestine territory (Novak, 1970, 259).
The idea of an independent or international Trieste overlaps in historical evocations of Trieste as an autonomous city-state, or as the cosmopolitan port of the Habsburg Empire. Both before and after the First World War, the socialist Valentino Pittoni had urged the transformation of Trieste into an independent territory as a means of salvaging its socialist identity, and of creating a federal Austria-Hungary? In 1914, the Italian government had suggested the Habsburgs create a 'free Trieste state' as the price for Italian neutrality. In the Second World War the image of an autonomous Trieste was revived under the quite different political circumstances of German occupation, concomitant with plans for a German dominated mitteleuropa.
The significance of this emphasis on the limits of nationalism in the course of the Second World War and immediately after, is evident in the 1943 Venezia Giulia Partito d'Azione manifesto which supported regional autonomy and the project of a federal Europe (Duroselle, 1966, appendix). In 1944 Emmanuele Flora (1954) went even further by proposing that the Trieste Partito d'Azione of which he was a member, support a plan for organising Trieste and its hinterland on the model of 'enclaves', which he regarded as an old historical solution. In his recollections of the formulation of this plan, Flora argued that by dispersing existing communities and linking them to each other by internationally-supervised connecting roads Italian and 'Slav' enclaves could be created, forcing 'an atmosphere of collaboration between Italy and Jugoslavia'. '(T)he internationalisation of streets under the aegis of the UN', he argued, 'would have had to prevent or at least reduce the friction'. Flora assumed that ethnic communities should be (and could be) segregated, and that they could coexist within the same state. Despite his acceptance of the primacy of ethnically-determined communities, his reconsideration of the spatial organisation of Trieste has been linked to his expulsion from the Partito d'Azione late in 1945, a period when the dominant right wing of the Venezia Giulia party branch excommunicated figures it regarded as 'slavophile' and pro-communist3
2	The resurrection of a Triestine city-state tradition also had its less fashionable moments, as evident in a successfully disparaging thesis written by the Triestine historian Fabio Cusin in the late 1920s, and the obvious failures of the independent city experiments of Fiume and Danzig.
3	These included the historian Fabio Cusin and the medical doctor Bruno Pincherle Allied Information Service (1945).
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Regardless of political persuasion, for many contemporaries with a desire to be free of the past, and of history, the horrors of the Second World War and their location in the evils of nationalism were incitements to more imaginative geo-political arrangements in Europe.4 In September 1945, the historian AJP Taylor launched a sceptical assessment of any conventional political solution to Trieste's future on the BBC World Affairs radio programme. His depiction of the Trieste problem focused on the difficulty of deciding the criteria according to which Trieste's legitimate population could be defined (Taylor, 1945).5 It was the impossibility of absolutely identifying a fixed 'ethnicity' for the local population which, he argued, had led to the idea of creating a 'free city' and possibly heralded a new era in European politics. Taylor claimed:
'If the scheme (for a free city) works it will make nonsense of all our present ideas of passport and customs. And if it works it won't stop at Trieste. Trieste is one symbol of the way things are going. The frontier area between Italy and Jugoslavia has always been an area of conflict, and conflicting ways of life still meet there today. Latin and Slav, Eastern and Western. They conflict but they meet...'
For all his anxiety about a conventional solution to the 'problem of Trieste', Taylor relied on an extremely conventional identification of Trieste as a point of cultural oppositions, of West and East, of Latin and Slav, and, like Flora, he essentialised that opposition in terms of potential conflict. His speech though captured some of the anomalies at stake in the postwar formulation of the question of Trieste and the possibility for reimagining the operation of frontiers or boundaries as they affected movement between states.
In the same month that Taylor aired his ideas on the BBC, Dr. Pierpaolo Luzzat-to-Fegiz, Professor of Statistics at Trieste University, wrote a letter to The Times, arguing that 'scientific ingenuity' should be applied to reconceptualise international affairs: 'One goal to be reached is the abandonment of the old idea of borders: a border should no longer be considered an impassable wall, fixed for all times to come' (Luzzatto-Fegiz, 1945, 9). A neutral mixed area could be created with special governing committees in the wait for a federated Europe which would undermine the need for territorial boundaries. Carlo Schiffrer's geographical and historical account of the italianita of Venezia Giulia in the 1946 publication La Venezia Giulia. Saggio di Una Carta dei Limiti Nazionali Italo-Jugoslavi concluded that a national boundary between Italy and Yugoslavia would be drawn within a federated Europe which would to a large extent make the need for such a boundary redundant (Schiffrer,
4	For the general fervour in Europe for social renewal and a break with the past after the Second World War, see Hobsbawm (1990, chp. 5).
5	The Foreign Office, warned beforehand, was nervous about Taylor's speech. There was nothing they could do though since the Ministry of Information controlled programming.
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1990, 87). Luzzatto-Fegiz did not suggest (even though Schiffrer assumed that they tability of borders is notable.
that 'Slavs' would be a part of this Europe would be), but his acceptance of the mu-
From the catalogue of the exibition "The Paris Peace Treaty and the Slovene Western Border 1945-1947", The Regional Museum Koper, 25. Sept. - 25 Oct. 1997.
Even the most stalwart supporters of a pro-Italian solution to the Trieste problem set their plans for reunification with the Italian state within a larger model of European federation, considering the ratification of the rights of the nation-state through ethnic boundaries as only one aspect of a total political solution. Edmond Puecher (the Allied Military Government-appointed President of the Venezia Giulia Zone until 1947) published a pamphlet in March 1946 in which he argued that the denial of Trieste's inclusion within Italian borders was tantamount to a betrayal of international justice (Puecher, 1946). But any new solution had to accommodate the need for widening the circle of Italian filiation out towards Europe and the West. Giovanni Paladin, a local Triestine political tigure, came up with a 'Terza Forza' project which secured the boundaries of Italian nationalism within an anti-communist, anti-Balkan European federalist project (Paladin, 1946). These examples make clear that alternative forms of imagining national communities, and political sovereignty, did not intrinsically challenge chauvinistic or exclusive conceptions of legitimate citizenship
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grounded in frozen images of a Western Europe (to which Italy and Italians belonged) whose alter ego was the Slavic and communist Balkans.
In terms of the historical and political context which I have just outlined, it could be argued that the concept of the Free Territory of Trieste was the consequence of the irresolvable complexities involved in interpreting relationships between ethno-national identities, political representation and territorial sovereignty, between 'ethnos' and 'demos'. The almost inevitable failure of the Boundary Commission to provide the peace talks with a strategy which transcended the political oppositions amongst the delegations or even fitted them into neat ethnic categories, led to the replacement of a boundary separating the Yugoslav and Italian areas according to an 'ethnic' principle, with the creation of an autonomous region with no ostensible homogenous ethnic or political character, and with potentially three official languages-Italian, Slovene and Croatian (Novak, 1970, 256)?
In August 1946, a Foreign Office brief to the British delegate at the (Paris) Peace Conference, Sterndale Bennett, explained the decision to create a Free Territory as the result of the Boundary Commission's failure, having met what is described as 'an impassable rock in Trieste' (Bennett, 1946a): The Free Territory, it needs to be emphasised, was not based on a rejection of the 'ethnic principle', it merely acted as a compromise alternative. In harmony with the standard principle of 'leaving a minimum (of any one ethnic group) under alien rule', where 'alien' implied ethnically 'alien', the Free Territory was to have a 'neutral' government and would be under the international guardianship of the United Nations. The Free Territory would have its own currency, official flag and coat of arms, 'a silver halberd on a blood-red background' (Novak, 1970, 272). Special Free Territory stamps were to be printed, and produce from the region was to be marked 'Made in FTT'. The head of the Allied Military Government in Trieste, Col. Alfred Bowman, explained that the Free Territory was to be 'neither a State nor a Nation' (Bowman, 1946). Instead the appropriate adjectives were 'public', 'general' or 'territorial'.
The Free Territory was 'free' insofar as citizenship was not formally predicated on any intrinsic ethnic identity. Citizenship was not however an open privilege. It depended, in the first instance, on historical precedent, on being an Italian citizen 'domiciled on June 10 1940 in the area comprised within the boundaries of the Free Territory', or the children of those Italian citizens (Novak, 1970, 272). Rules for inclusion of new citizens were to be considered by the Free Territory government, once it had come into existence. The limit of international faith in this new citizenship is evident in the provision that the United Nations' Security Council would appoint the
6 The new solution was proclaimed during a strike protesting the shooting of three procommunist demonstrators by AMG police in San Giacomo (one fatal), after attacks on Slovene and pro-communist institutions.
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Free Territory's key officials (including the Governor) and that none of them could be citizens of the Territory. While historians have argued that these provisions were the consequences of Anglo-American attempts to maintain control of Trieste and prevent it from falling into communist hands, the concerns of Realpolitik overlapped with the premises of ethno-nationalism and the inconsistencies in contemporary views of ethnicity. The long-serving British Political Adviser, William Sullivan, reported to the Foreign Office that the practicality of the Free Territory scheme was lirrited by the extent to which 'national and ideological fanaticism' could be overcome and a 'corporate consciousness' fostered-though even he regarded the scheme as the only long-term plan likely to work (Sullivan, 1946b and Joyce, 1947). In November 1946, Bowman announced his own scepticism regarding the Free Territory, arguing that 'it would possibly take two generations for (Free territory citizens) to become assimilated and for them to consider themselves as members of a sovereign state rather than either Slovene or Italian...' (Bowman, 1946). In effect, he emphasised both the intransigence of local national identities, and their vulnerability to change (Bowman, 1946). Bowman also ignored the fact that he himself had outlawed the use of the term 'state' to describe the new entity, reducing, in the terms of his own world-view, the legitimacy of the Territory's international status.
The Free Territory fitted the idealistic and ideological vision of the Marshall Plan for the recovery and reshaping of Europe as promoted by the United States. The thrust of the Marshall Plan was to integrate the territory into a 'unified Western European economy'. Ivan White, from the Foreign Office, reported that the future of the FTT lay with the transcendence of economic and labour borders in order to create the new Europe (White, 1948, 1). In this vision of a Europe united through the Marshall Plan, the boundaries of ethnic divisions were subjugated for economic purposes. The nation would be sacrificed to European integration as the expression of political unity with no space for communism or its fellow travellers (Robertson, 1947, 3). However, the political historian Giampaolo Valdevit has argued the shift in approach to the Trieste question was symptomatic of British and United States' governments self-interest rather than idealism (Valdevit, 1987, 144-163). On this view, the Free Territory plan constituted at most a stalling measure allowing the continuation of AMG rule, since its fruition depended on the appointment of a Governor acceptable to all parties to the Peace Treaty.
Reports from Trieste to the British War Office and Foreign Office intimated that there was a sense of finality about the Peace Conference decision to create a Free Territory of Trieste which the local population had come to accept (Allied Information Services, 1946). Their overall conclusion was that the average Triestine reacted well to the Paris decisions (British Political Adviser,1946). The concept of a 'Free Territory' did not represent any single ideal among the diverse interest-groups in Trieste. Business groups responded well to the Free Territory's promise of a free port
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and potential improvement in trade. The Allied Military Government reported it had received 58 petitions bearing 4,263 signatures of people from Gorizia and neighbouring Slovene-speaking villages addressed to the Paris Conference and demanding incorporation in the new Free Territory. There was some indication that in the villages of Zone B adjacent to the Morgan Line the locals would opt, as second best, for union with Catholic Austria, into a kind of 'Switzerland of the Adriatic' embracing Austria, Friuli and Slovenia in a democratic Christian federation (Charles, 1946). Ferdinand Gandusio, as President of the Zone Council, shared these economic expectations of the new territory, but also believed that it should cover a maximum area for political reasons (Sullivan, 1946c). The concept of a 'Free Territory' also suited those who sought a solution that might offer longterm territorial peace. The pro-Yugoslav movement fatalistically accepted the FTT as an alternative to cooption of disputed territories into the Italian nation-state. As far as the Allied Military Government could tell, pro-Yugoslav groups wanted the Free Territory to include Monfalcone and exclude North-west Istria, and for Gorizia to be part of Yugoslavia (Sullivan, 1947 a). Pro-Italians looked on the Free Territory as an eccentricity that denied Italy Trieste, and the Istrian coastline. A military report for the end of September 1947 confirmed the existence of discontent regarding the creation of a 'Free Territory':
'Disorders broke out in Trieste on 15 September. They began by 'right wing' Italian elements proclaiming a day of mourning for the crucifixion of Venezia Giulia. 'Action squads' were in action in the city enforcing the closing of shops and attacking Communist and pro-Slav organisations. Hand grenades and sub-machine guns were used, and the total casualties were three dead, three seriously wounded, and twenty-two detained in hospital (British Element Trieste Force, 1947).'
The fear of the loss of Italian irredenta and the evolution of 'independentists' who looked with favour on the FTT provoked not only sporadic violence amongst ardent nationalists, but incited the burgeoning of neo-fascist groups (Sullivan, 1946c).
The Free Territory soon went the way of mooted alternative possibilities; it met an exasperated end, thanks to the Cold War politics that Giampaolo Valdevit has described so well (Valdevit, 1987). The possible success of the Free Territory, of a nonnationalist solution to the 'problem of Trieste' would have meant the dissipation of Anglo-American influence over the containment of communism, a purpose to which some American and British officials had become committed. Historians have also emphasised the contribution of local nationalisms to the failure of the Free Territory (Rabel, 1988, 87). Less attention has been paid to the influence of the Allied Military Government on perceptions of the viability of the Free Territory, and of promoting the commonsense, or inevitable, investment of a solution to the Trieste problem according to the ethnic principle - a principle which, in the postwar, reinforced the depiction of 'Slavs' as foreigners in Italian territory.
As the ideological oppositions of the Cold War consolidated, the deteriorating
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international situation was reflected locally in a renewed stress by the AMG on the delineation of enemies, whether in the form of prostitutes and disorderly women and peasants, or the presence of the 'red flag' in Trieste. The AMG's authority was crumbling around it, and with it the certainties of the British and American way of life (Sullivan, 1947b). High-ranking AMG officers were found guilty of embezzlement and defrauding public funds, AMG forces used violence against local citizens, its prisons were full of detainees held without trial for up to 15 months, and its courts were prone to iniquitous judgements against members of left-wing groups while its own personnel and neofascists received relatively light sentencing (Vetter & Ranchi, n.d., 214-216). This picture of the AMG contributed to the greater cynicism and resentment of large segments of the population not in its direct employ, even the pro-Italians who saw the AMG as a front for British colonialism, denying, as the University Rector protested, the natural rule of Italy (Munnecke, 1947). It is against this background that early in 1948, General Terence Airey, Colonel Bowman's replacement as Senior Civil Affairs Officer of the Allied Military Government in Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste, reported to the UN Security Council that the Triestines had 'disclosed no evidence of a real, disinterested and ready disposition to build up a local Triestine political consciousness distinct from, but not necessarily antagonistic to, Italian or Jugoslav national and racial ideology' (Airey, 1948, 2). If we consider Bowman and Sullivan's earlier assessments of the Free Territory idea, then Airey's comments were in keeping with the dominant AMG representation not only of the Free Territory idea, but of the nature of the population for which they had responsibility. Yet, as always, it is difficult to discern in whose view, whose representation of Trieste, or of its 'people's will', we might be able to place our trust. In 1948 Ivan White, a representative of the Agency for International Development implementing the Marshall Fund, attacked the problem of 'localitis' (sic) in Trieste, referring to it as 'a luxury which we cannot afford' (White, 1948). This fear of strong local sentiment sat awkwardly with alternative Allied Military Government assessments of national feeling.
Ironically, the argument that there was no palpable sense of strong cross-ethnic local loyalty was not only employed by Allied Military Government officials divided in their appraisals of the Free Territory scheme, but had been an important part of the diplomatic negotiations for the creation of a Free Territory. In both cases the alleged existence of ethnic or 'racial' tensions were transposed onto the ideological divisions that defined the Cold War; essentialist ethnic identifications were used to identify communism as 'alien' to Western Europe, and in particular to Italy. The British diplomat Sterndale Bennett had successfully employed such representations at the peace negotiations, associating communism with anti-Italian forces in order to legitimate the United Kingdom's denial of popular representation as the basis the Free Territory government, for fear it would lead to the domination of the Territory by communist
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forces. He proposed that concentrating power at the outset in the hands of a popular Assembly would be 'unworkable' (Bennett, 1946b and Valdevit, 1987, 145ff.). By depicting the Soviet Union's requests for universal suffrage and a Governor subservient to the Popular Assembly as a 'devious unscrupulous' attempt at obtaining a Slovene majority in the Assembly, Bennett associated communist influence with Slovene identity (Bennett, 1946c).7 Instead he defended 'the British preference for the form of the Free Territory', placing ultimate authority with the Governor rather than the Council and Assembly on the basis of 'the old form of Crown Colony constitution'.
The denial of political representation was grounded in the representation of Italian and 'Slav' identities as respectively Western, anti-communist, and Eastern, communist. In 1946, however, when the Free Territory was still to be implemented, an Intelligence report from a different source emphasised the possibility that the Free Territory might inspire a 'Democratic Front', 'uniting all Left Wing and progressive elements... under Communist auspices' (GSI, 1946). In this group it included, 'those Italian workers and members lower middle-classes who have hitherto supported Italian cause because of pro-Jugoslav bias of PCG (Venezia Giulia Communist party) and UAIS. Common front with Communists known to be favoured by PINCHERLE group and some Left Wing Italian socialists.'
In official, and informal reports among the British and American administration and their state representatives it was the poor nature of what were referred to as 'race relations' which was used to define and validate policy measures and strategies for the resolution of the 'problem of Trieste'. In late 1946, reports emanating from the Foreign Office prompted the belief that the Yugoslavs had 'in the classic Slav manner' created an efficient and widespread network of agents trained to take over political control, and that it was only the presence of 'Anglo-U.S. Military government and troops' which guaranteed the aversion of a civil war (Bennett, 1946a). The Allied Military Government's persistent refusal of requests for elections, and their assertion of the need for a British and United States presence reliedon representations of the relationship between 'Slav' and Italian as discrete identities and as essentially hostile. The assumption that race relations within Trieste were fundamentally antagonistic underpinned Allied Military Government assessments of the area's political future and would come to dominate historical assessments of the realism of political alternatives to the constitution of ethnically imagined communities and territories. The fear of conflict between Italians and 'Slavs' masked Anglo-American anxiety about their cooperation across ethnic or national boundaries through com-
7 This interpretation was actually rejected by W. Shank, a Foreign Office official, who believed that any majority would be communist, composed of both Italians and Slovenes, W. Shank (1946).
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mon political interests - particularly communism (GSI, 1946)8 Most importantly, in British and American reports cooperation between Italians and 'Slavs' itself became characterised as a communist ploy, and unrealistic in the context of the assertions regarding the predominance of racial/ethnic conflict.
On March 20 1948, the Peace Treaty stipulations were renegged officially, and replaced by the Tripartite Proposal. Formulated by the United States, the United Kingdom and France, the new proposal promised officially to return the Free Territory to Italy (Novak, 1970, 281). Regardless of the Boundary Commission's own failure to traverse the 'impassable rock' it found at Trieste, and the 1947 Peace Treaty constitution's emphasis on the ethnic and political heterogeneity of the area, ethnic and political oppositions were to be formalised by the drawing of national boundaries. Local support for the Free Territory solution, and for 'fraternity', for cooperative solutions to the problem of Trieste, for the possibility of imagining alternative communities, had been undermined by resort to the argument that ethnicities (or races) required their own states and, in this case, even more significantly, that the frontier between communism and democracy was indelible.
The history of the shortlived idea of the Free Territory, the lynchpin of the 1947 Peace Treaty, can be written as a consequence of the fundamental contradictions inherent in the concept of the 'ethnic principle', and of the influence of anti-nationalist idealism that associated the horrors of the Second World War with the implementation of the logic of racial nationalism. It could also be argued that the ambiguities of ethnic and 'racial' forms of identification provoked attempts at international, national and local levels between 1945 and 1954 to assert ethno-national territoriality as the most 'authentic' (and democratic) basis of political sovereignty, and as the resolution to the 'problem of Trieste'. The ethnic identification of territory required the existence of fixed transhistorical categories of identity. In Trieste it came to mean specifically being able to distinguish a 'Slav' from an Italian. The assumption that the 'problem of Trieste' lay in its 'racial' or cultural heterogeneity reinforced the ethnic principle as the solution to that problem in local policy formation, and as a strategy for conflict resolution in the realm of international relations and diplomacy. The history of the Free Territory's demise is part of the history of the intensification of the Cold War, but it also marks the process by which a self-identified 'Western' 'anti-communist' Europe delegitimated alternative images of national sovereignty (alternatives promoted within Trieste, as well as circulated within European and Anglophone context) through recourse to images of unyielding national/ cultural/political oppositions, to the naturalness of racial hatred, and to the acceptance that space could be ethnically determined. These arguments for a ethno-na-
8 The Trieste Area General had already defined the FTT as bringing about political regroupings rather than orientating the social and economic situation along national lines.
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tional solution to the problem of Trieste, although formulated under the strictures of 'Realpolitik', took on the force of commonsense. They were accepted as logical in the domain of international relations, and they influenced the shape of the international cultural memory of the 'problem of Trieste', and of the histories of Trieste and Ven-ezia Giulia that have been told and written since.
PREDSTAVLJAJOČ SI ETNIČNI PROSTOR: STO, NARODOVA SUVERENOST IN MIROVNA POGODBA IZ LETA 1947
Glenda SLUGA Univerza v Sydneyu, Evropske študije, AU-Sydney 2006
POVZETEK
Svobodno tržaško ozemlje je bilo ključni cilj mirovne pogodbe leta 1947. Ideja o svobodnem ozemlju se je v tem dokumentu porodila in propadla v smislu povojnih domnevanj o etnično določeni politični subjektivnosti in etnično določljivem narodnem ozemlju. Medtem ko je svobodno ozemlje poizkušalo ustvariti nenacionalno geopolitično območje, je bila državna meja, ki so jo sčasoma določili med Italijo in Jugoslavijo, rezultat realpolitike hladne vojne in je temeljila na prispodobah nepopustljivih nacionalnih, kulturnih in političnih opozicij, na rasni nestrpnosti in sprejemljivosti, da je ozemlje lahko etnično določeno.
REFERENCES
Airey, T. (1948) - PRO - Public Record Office, London, WO 204/10432, Cited in
HQAMG Trieste Monthly Report, February, 1948. Allied Information Service (1945) - PRO, WO 204/6400, 'Trieste AIS D Section
Secret Report', Report No. 1126, September 1945. Allied Information Service (1946) - PRO, Quarterly historical report of AIS,
Trieste, AIS Activities 13-27 October 1946, Secret No. 51, General Summary. Bennett, S. (1946a) - PRO, FO 371 57215 (Reconstruction) U6815/360/g 79, 'Viability of the Free Territory of Trieste', Brief No. 10 for the U. K. Delegation to the Peace Conference, 17 August 1946. Bennett, S. (1946b) - PRO, FO 371 59362 R 13641/3/92, Text of speech by the British delegate Mr. Sterndale Bennett on the FTT draft statutes' 13 September 1946.
Bennett, S. (1946c) - PRO, FO 371, 59360 R 12856/3/92, 'From Sterndale Bennett to Mr. Colville', Draft Instrument for a provisional regime in Trieste, 28 August 1946.
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Bowman, A. (1946) - PRO, WO 204/10988, Minutes of Misc. Meetings, 1 Oct - 27 Dec 1946, HQAMG meeting 12 November 1946.
British Element Trieste Force (1947) - PRO, Quarterly Historical Reports HQ British Element Trieste Force, 15/9/47 to 31/12/47 Top Secret, quarter ending 30 September 1947.
British Political Adviser (1946) - PRO, FO 371/59368 R15919/3/92, Staff of Rep. British Political Adviser, Situation Report, 11 - 17 October 1946.
Charles, Sir Noel (1946) - PRO, FO 37159361 R12209/3/9, Situtation summary 2329 August 1946.
Duroselle, J. B. (1966): Le Conflit de Trieste 1943-l954. Editions de I'Institut de Sociologie de I'Universite libre de Bruxelles.
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ACTA HISTRIAE VI.
Glenda SLUGA: 'INVENTING ETHNIC SPACES: 'FREE TERRITORY', ... 173-186
White, I. (1948) - NA, RG 286, Agency for International Development Economic Cooperation Adminstration Mission to Trieste, Office of the Director, file 341, White to SecState, Washington, 5 May 1948.
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