Identities in European borderlands

Blog post by Christian Lamour, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxembourg

Late modernity in the European Union is characterized by the return of ‘hot nationalism’, with a growing number of citizens supporting radical right parties and leaders. These political entities and personnel have hammered out an electoral winning, ‘nation-first’ agenda, which is notably marketed as protecting the cultural identity and cohesion of a national people, jeopardized by alien threats.

This vivid return of national cultural identities in the agenda of European states has appeared at a time when relationships between EU member states have been remarkably peaceful for generations, whereas their main long-term heritage has been the reproduction of national conflicts, territorial gains and momentary stabilization of borders following treaties torn apart in subsequent wars. The cultural enemies defined by today’s EU radical right within specific nation states are not neighbouring nations, but communities, the identities of which are represented as external to the world of nations. This means the elites are characterized as Europeanized/globalized, whilst the non-European migrants are racialized as oriental/African entities replacing the European national identities with the support of the globalized elite.​

Nevertheless, tensions around the expression of national cultural identities can also exist within the European Union. They can even be instrumentalized by radical-right populist forces and their allies. This is especially the case when public institutions have to address the commemoration of a difficult past, exposing the conflicts between nation states and the suffering of communities essentialized as embedded within exclusionary nations. The tension can be particularly important when commemorations take place within cross-border European regions, which have experienced multiple shifts of state borders, ethnic cleansing and the exile of populations during the violent twentieth century.

The objective of my Identities article, ‘The truth of two cities: Trieste, Rijeka and the interplay between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in cross-border regional Europe’, is to investigate how cities located on the different sides of nation states within such cross-border regions produce a representation of the past, expressing the strength of nationalism within a European Union while the EU construction has been based on negotiated reflexivity on the national ‘other’, meaning cosmopolitanism. Based on the analysis of the 2019 exhibitions organized in Trieste (Italy) and Rijeka (Croatia) about the illegal occupation of Rijeka by the Italian nationalist leader Gabriele D’Annunzio in post-WWI, and which offered a clear focus on women’s history, the article shows that nationalism and cosmopolitanism are structural ideologies dealt with by curators in both countries.

Curators cannot exclude themselves from the world of European nation states, now hijacked by the radical right in most European countries. Nevertheless, they can also express a disposition of the mind, or habitus, leading them to reflect on multiple identities beyond the exclusionary frame of nations in cross-border regional contexts. The representation of women’s history in the past conflictual Europe for today’s European citizenry in EU borderlands must be considered as a subjective practice, determined by agents in the field of curatorship who have developed a specific trajectory in the milieu and are eager to negotiate between the force of nationalism and the meaningfulness of cosmopolitanism.

---

​Image credit: Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral Rijeka photo archives

---

Read the Identities article:
Lamour, Christian. (2023). The truth of two cities: Trieste, Rijeka and the interplay between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in cross-border regional Europe. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: ​10.1080/1070289X.2023.2284535

Read further in Identities:

‘The opposite of nationalism’? Rethinking patriotism in US political discourse

The dialectics of urban cosmopolitanism: between tolerance and intolerance in cities of strangers

What are museums for? The enduring friction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism