The Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its Diasporas from Disputed Territories: the Cases of Prekmurje/Muravidék and Venezia Giulia/Julian March Emigrants

Miha Zobec, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Following the Paris Peace Conference, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia annexed Prekmurje previously within Hungarian territory while Italy gained the region of Venezia Giulia predominantly populated by Slovenes and Croats. Both Italy and Yugoslavia aimed at nationalizing newly acquired territories. While Yugoslavia worked on diminishing the Hungarian influence and repopulating the area with Slovenes, Italy attempted to italianize Slovenes and Croats by the use of force. Revisionist states of Yugoslavia and Hungary worked on regaining the territories “lost” in the aftermath of the Great War and advanced competing claims over the emigrants coming from Venezia Giulia and Prekmurje respectively. Whereas Yugoslavia considered Prekmurje’s emigrants to be part of its constitutive ethnicity, Hungary stressed the emigrants’ unique Wendish identity as well as their link to the putative Hungarian homeland. Likewise, Yugoslavia sought to imbue Venezia Giulia’s emigrants with its nation-building ideology although they were Italian citizens – suspicious for the Italian state because of their anti-fascism. Both the emigrants from Prekmurje and Venezia Giulia were supposed to form Yugoslavia’s “tenth banovina” (the putative tenth administrative unit of the Kingdom consisting of the Yugoslavs abroad). I will, firstly examine the Yugoslav efforts of governing the emigrants of Prekmurje in the USA, and Venezia Giulia emigrants in Argentina. Secondly, by analyzing the emigrants’ identifications I will evaluate the impact of the Yugoslav strategies of inculcating the nation-building ideology. While the emigrants of Prekmurje, rather than identifying with the state-sponsored yugoslavism, considered themselves to be Prekmurje’s Slovenes distinct from the Slovene Yugoslav nation, the emigrants of Venezia Giulia devised their own regionally inspired allegiance to Yugoslavia. Finally, by comparing the cases of Prekmurje and Venezia Giulia I will evaluate the intricacies of state-diaspora relations in the interwar East-Central Europe.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 114. Negotiating Historical Narrative