In the decade after World War II, up to 350,000 ethnic Italians were displaced from the border zone between Italy and Yugoslavia known as the Julian March. History in Exile reveals the subtle yet fascinating contemporary repercussions of this often overlooked yet contentious episode of European history. Pamela Ballinger asks: What happens to historical memory and cultural identity when state borders undergo radical transformation? She explores displacement from both the viewpoints of the exiles and those who stayed behind. Yugoslavia's breakup and Italy's political transformation in the early 1990s, she writes, allowed these people to bring their histories to the public eye after nearly half a century. Examining the political and cultural contexts in which this understanding of historical consciousness has been formed, Ballinger undertakes the most extensive fieldwork ever done on this subject--not only around Trieste, where most of the exiles settled, but on the Istrian Peninsula (Croatia and Slovenia), where those who stayed behind still live. Complementing this with meticulous archival research, she examines two sharply contrasting models of historical identity yielded by the "Istrian exodus": those who left typically envision Istria as a "pure" Italian land stolen by the Slavs, whereas those who remained view it as ethnically and linguistically "hybrid." We learn, for example, how members of the same family, living a short distance apart and speaking the same language, came to develop a radically different understanding of their group identities. Setting her analysis in engaging, jargon-free prose, Ballinger concludes that these ostensibly very different identities in fact share a startling degree of conceptual logic.

Uses the history of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border to examine how representations of difference have affected the politics of sovereignty during the twentieth century.

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. Homelands also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations.

The majority of scholarly works on the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the establishment of its successor states focus almost exclusively on the national question. There is no major study of the subnational regional dimension, which had significant effects on the politics and political structures of these newly independent states. This book addresses this deficit by examining the struggle of Istrian regionalists in the Istrian Democratic Assembly (IDS) against the nearly hegemonic nationalists of the Croatian ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ). Using a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, this instrumentalist analysis assays the political historiography of Istria in the 19th and 20th centuries, provides an analytical case study of the regionalist conflict with the HDZ in the 1990s and into the 21st century, illustrates how and why the regionalist party tried to influence both Istrians and Western Europeans in this struggle, and derives a critical analysis of the role of regionalism in European Union enlargement from this case study. It also shows that nationalists do not hold a monopoly on the politicization of identities.