Borderland Mimicry. Imperial Legacies, National Stands and Regional Identity in Croatia Istria after the Nineties

Nation building processes often exploit discourses of imperial legacies and, not surprisingly, by the 1990s onwards it was often the case in South Eastern Europe. Such legacies – the Venetian, the Habsburg and the Ottoman ones – were generally used by the local elites to reinforce the conflicts between different nationalist ideologies, which were pictured like conflicts of civilization. However, Imperial legacies also convey narratives of hybrid identities, everyday life coexistence and multiple belonging. Sometimes, it is less acknowledged these narratives were sometimes activated at the local level to contrast the disrupting effect of nationalist trend of social and cultural homogenization (Richardson 2008; Laven, Baycroft 2008; Driessen 2005; Bufon, Minghi 2000). According to the foregone, the main hypothesis of this paper is that the twofold nature of the imperial legacies, both supporting ethno-national identification and local patterns of territorial identification, emerges in the context of a problematic relation between nationality and citizenship in the newly born South East European states (Schwara 2003). This difficult relation, which is extremely evident in the Croatian region of Istria, includes a number of conflicting approaches to nationality that promote social inclusion or exclusion of state citizens on the base of a scale of ethnicity – basically, being more or less “national” – which is reinforced by territorial, ideological, gender, religious and ethnic divides (Cocco 2007). In the case of Istria, a multi-ethnic frontier region situated at the periphery of the Croatian state, I believe that the inconsistencies between nationality and citizenship also engender a strong spatial tension between the dimension of national identity – involving ethno-cultural contents - and the one of state identity – involving territorial and institutional elements -, which are rarely coincident in areas where the nation-state is a latecomer (Kaplan 1994). While state identity involves membership in a polity and the citizenship that comes for the integration in the juridical system, the spatial dimension of national identity is sometimes emotionally deeper and usually more ambiguous; it includes the “primordial attachment to the land” (Grosby 1995) and a “discursive landscape” (Häkli 1999), which are imbued in the culture of the collective memory of the people: the “territorialized memory” in Smith’s words (Smith 1996). As a result, people living in peripheral regions like Istria, where central institutions are weaker and there are influences across political boundaries from neighboring states, often grow a borderland identity that lives together with the state identity and the national one in a context of ambivalence and hybridism. Then, especially if minorities inhabit this space, the borderland identity can be institutionalized at the sub-state level through calls for regional autonomy (Paasi 1996) that can endanger state efforts to secure ideologically and culturally its borders.