Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall
of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how
the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the
nation. ...The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know
about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall
of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year
period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia)
generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former
Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the
flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who aimed to annex the
territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many
local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of
nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows
that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the
driver's seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the
daily frustrations of life in a "ghost state" set adrift by the
fall of the empire. D'Annunzio's ideology and proto-fascist
charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was
prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had
enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between
the world that was and the world that would be, many across the
former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance
that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to
nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist
self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore
the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth
narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis
demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves
out an essential place for history from below.
The article examines how the post-WWI, post-Habsburg city-state Fiume (today known as Rijeka in the Republic of Croatia) tried to shore up loyalty and diminish local discontent by providing welfare ...and economic initiatives, in direct conjunction with how much neighboring states offered. Of particular concern were comparisons with how the Fiume state dealt with the Krone currency crisis, especially as locals in Fiume were very aware of and traded in currencies of neighboring lands using the same base money. The article calls for more work to be done on the dynamic of “on-the-ground” post-imperial Europeans questioning their new governments based on how they compared their lot with their other post-Habsburg neighbors.
From the ashes of empire, the nation rose on a wave of idealism. That, at least, is the standard tale. Dominique Reill argues that empire retained many supporters after 1919. Investigating the ...post-WWI crisis in multicultural, urbane Fiume, she finds that the stories of empire's cosmopolitans have been overwritten by the triumph of nationalism.
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.
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