‘National Refugees’, Displaced Persons, and the Reconstruction of Italy: The Case of Trieste

  • Pamela Ballinger
Chapter

Abstract

After the era of state socialism in Europe came to a close in 1991, scholars began to rethink both the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it. Access to previously closed archives played a key role in the transformation of knowledge, but just as important was the questioning of seeming truisms. Tony Judt notes that

What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air […] In retrospect the years 1945–89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century.1

Keywords

Refugee Camp Peace Treaty Italian State Displace Person Italian Peninsula 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Download to read the full chapter text

Notes

  1. A modified version of the arguments contained here appeared as Pamela Ballinger, ‘Trieste: The City as Displaced Persons Camp’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas (Yearbook for the History and Culture of South Eastern Europe) 8 (2006): 153–74. The research for this article was made possible by a 1999 Summer Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NEH Post-Classical Humanistic/ Modern Italian Studies Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and multiple awards from the Fletcher Fund at Bowdoin College. I am grateful to the staffs at the UNRRA archive (New York), Archives Nationales (Paris), the archive at the Ministero degli Affari Esteri (Rome), and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome). As always, I thank the many Istrians who have shared their experiences with me.Google Scholar
  2. 1.
    Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 1–2.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    For a critique of the new Cold War history’s relative neglect of the realms of the socio-cultural, as opposed to those of ‘high politics’, see P. Major and R. Mitter, ‘East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War’, Cold War History 4, no. 1 (2003), 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 3.
    Ilaria Poggiolini, ‘Translating Memories of War and Co-Belligerency into Politics: The Italian Post-War Experience’, in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, ed. J. W. Müller (Cambridge, 2002), 232.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    See my critique of Karen Pinkus’s reading of L’Eclisse as a story of silencing about decolonization. P. Ballinger, ‘Borders of the Nation, Borders of Citizenship: Italian Repatriation and the Redefinition of National Identity after World War II’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 3 (2007), 714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 5.
    Michael Dunford and Lidia Greco, After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change (Maiden/Oxford, 2006), 5.Google Scholar
  7. 6.
    Much of the scholarship on the immediate post-war period in Italy has instead examined political and economic reconstruction under American tutelage, with a focus on the Anglo-American desire to shore up Italy as a strategic bulwark against communism. See John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (Cambridge, 2002).Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    Sandi Volk, Esuli a Trieste: Bonifica nazionale e rafforzamento dell’italianità sul confine orientale (Udine, 1994), 316–17.Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    On the ever-growing literature on the Istrian exodus, see Gloria Nemec, Un paese perfetto: Storia e memoria di una comunità in esilio. Grisignana d’Istria, 1930–1960 (Trieste, 1998);Google Scholar
  10. Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, 2003);Google Scholar
  11. Raoul Pupo, Il lungo esodo. Istria: le persecuzioni, le foibe, l’esilio (Milan, 2005). Also see Gustavo Corni’s contribution to this volume.Google Scholar
  12. 10.
    Literature on the broader post-war refugee crisis in Europe with discussion of Trieste includes United Nations, The Refugee in the Post-War World: Preliminary Report of a Survey of the Refugee Problem (Geneva, 1951);Google Scholar
  13. Anthony Bouscaren, International Migrations since 1945 (New York, 1963);Google Scholar
  14. A. Lane, ‘Putting Britain Right with Tito: The Displaced Persons Question in Anglo-Yugoslav Relations 1946–7’, European History Quarterly 22 (1992), 217–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 12.
    Ariella Verrocchio, ‘Introduzione’, in Trieste Anni Cinquanta. Ricostruzione: Trieste tra ricostruzione e ritorno all’Italia (1941–1954), ed. A.Verrocchio (Tavagnacco, 2004), 19.Google Scholar
  16. 13.
    Tullia Catalan, ‘L’organizzazione dell’assistenza a Trieste durante il Governo Militare Alleato’, in Trieste Anni Cinquanta. La città reale: economia, società e vita quotidiana, 1945–1954, eds Pier Angelo Toninelli, Bianca Cuderi, Adriano Dugulin, Giulio Mellinato, and Annamaria Vinci (Tavagnacco, 2004), 112.Google Scholar
  17. 14.
    These terminological differences between types of refugees reflects the reality that no one definition has been universally accepted for ‘refugee’, an essentially contested concept. See Rune Johansson, ‘The Refugee Experience in Europe after World War II: Some Theoretical and Empirical Considerations’, in The Uprooted: Torced Migration as an International Problem in the Post-War Era, ed. Göran Rystad (Lund, 1990), 229.Google Scholar
  18. 18.
    UNRRA Archive, S-520, Box 249, Antonio D’Andrea, Campi Profughi, Centri di Lavoro, di Studio e di Educazione Professionale. On sfollati as a descriptive term for internally displaced Italians, go to M. Sanfllippo, ‘Per una storia dei profughi stranieri e dei campi di accoglienza e di reclusione nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra’, Studi Emigrazione/Migration Studies XLIII, no. 164 (2006), 838 (fn. 16).Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    International Refugee Organization Archive (IRO), Archives Nationales, Paris, Fond AJ 43, 107, 15 November 1949, Program Committee Paper No. 1. During the war, the Allied Expeditionary Force distinguished ‘refugees’ (stateless civilians) from ‘displaced persons’ (individuals displaced out of their everyday environment in terms of state, language, and family). DPs were then further subclassifled as ‘United Nations Displaced Persons’ (displaced individuals from Allied or neutral states) and ‘Enemy DP’ (DPs from enemy states) or ‘Ex-Enemy Displaced Persons’ (individuals from states like Italy). Gerald Steinacher, ‘L’Alto Adige come regione di transito dei rifugiati (1945–1950)’, Studi Emigrazione/Migration Studies XLIII, no. 164 (2006), 821.Google Scholar
  20. 25.
    On IRO and debates over Italians from Venezia Giulia, see P. Ballinger, ‘Opting for Identity: The Politics of International Refugee Relief in Venezia Giulia, 1948–1952’, Acta Histriae 14 (2006), 115–40.Google Scholar
  21. 30.
    Guy Goodwin-Gill, ‘Different Types of Forced Migration Movements as an International and National Problem’, in The Uprooted: Forced Migration as an International Problem in the Post-War Era, ed. Göran Rystad (Lund, 1990), 28.Google Scholar
  22. 32.
    Liliana Ferrari, ‘Gli Esuli a Trieste (1947–1953)’, in Storia di un esodo. Istria 1945–1956, eds Cristiana Columini, Liliana Ferrari, Gianna Nassisi, and Germano Trani (Trieste, 1980), 433; also Volk, Esuli a Trieste, 71.Google Scholar
  23. 33.
    Spazzali claims that the Italian state offered aid to over a million national refugees. Roberto Spazzali, ‘Assistenza, come?’, in C.R.P. Per una storia dei campi profughi Istriani, Fiumani e Dalmati in Italia (1945–1970), ed. Piero Delbello (Trieste, 2004), 45. The OAPGD later became the Ente Nazionale Lavoratori Rimpatri e Profughi (ENLRP), which was dissolved in 1977. Volk, Esuli a Trieste, 94.Google Scholar
  24. 35.
    Enrico Neami, ‘Campi profughi in Italia: Tanti archivi per un archivio?’, in C.R.P. Per una storia dei campi profughi Istriani, Fiumani e Dalmati in Italia (1945–1970), ed. Piero Delbello (Trieste, 2004), 32–3.Google Scholar
  25. 52.
    H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York, 1989);Google Scholar
  26. Beatrice Heuser, Western Containment Policies in the Cold War. The Yugoslav Case, 1948–53 (London, 1989);Google Scholar
  27. Ann Lane, Britain, the Cold War and Yugoslav Unity, 1941–1949 (Brighton, 1996).Google Scholar
  28. 54.
    Volk, Esuli a Trieste, 187; Elena Marchigiani, ‘Una lunga emergenza abitativa’, in: Trieste Anni Cinquanta: La città della ricostruzione urbanistica, edilizia sociale e industria a Trieste 1945–1957, eds Paola Di Biagi, Elena Marchigiani, and Alessandra Marin (Tavagnacco, 2004), 42–71, 69.Google Scholar
  29. 71.
    Giulio Mellinato, ‘Il governo delle risorse’, in Ricostruzione. Trieste tra ricostruzione e ritorno all’Italia (1945–1954), ed. Ariella Verrocchio (Tavagnacco, 2004), 38–49, 43.Google Scholar
  30. 78.
    Kaye Webb and Ronald Searle, Refugees 1960: A Report in Words and Drawings (London, 1960), 26.Google Scholar
  31. 80.
    Alan Male, ‘Sovraffolamento e promiscuità’, in C.R.P. Per una storia dei campi profughi Istriani, Fiumani e Dalmati in Italia (1945–1970), ed. Piero Delbello (Trieste, 2004), 129–31, 129.Google Scholar
  32. 85.
    Massimiliano Lacota, ‘Recuperare la dignità attraverso la memoria’, in C.R.P. Per una storia dei campi profughi Istriani, Fiumani e Dalmati in Italia (1945–1970), ed. Piero Delbello (Trieste, 2004), 13.Google Scholar
  33. 87.
    P. Ballinger, ‘Lines in the Water, Peoples on the Map: Maritime Museums and the Representation of Cultural Boundaries in the Upper Adriatic’, Narodna umjetnost 43 (2006), 15–39;Google Scholar
  34. Maura Hametz, Making Trieste Italian, 1918–1954 (Woodbridge, 2005), 162.Google Scholar
  35. 89.
    Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995).Google Scholar
  36. 91.
    Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), 35. See also Malkki, Purity and Exile.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  37. 94.
    Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, 1998), 57, 101.Google Scholar
  38. 95.
    P. Scrivano, ‘Signs of Americanization in Italian Domestic Life: Italy’s Postwar Conversion to Consumerism’, Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 2005), 322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Pamela Ballinger 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Pamela Ballinger

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations