Internationalist Networking in a Multicultural Setting: Workers' Associations in Trieste (1888 - 1927)
Sabine Rutar
My paper is a combination of two papers that I have given at conferences last January in Leipzig (on workers' associations and the development of the urban public sphere in Trieste prior to World War One) and three weeks ago in Trieste (on constructions of the Self and the Other in terms of national identity among Triestine workers). I have added methodological reflections concerning the topic of the seminar, Sociability as a historical category, referring to the works of Maurizio Ridolfi, as well as to the contributions published in a volume of the Historische Zeitschrift, and, recently, in Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica and in Ricerche di storia politica, leaving aside the influential works of Maurice Agulhon, which, in one way or other, have been considered and reflected all over - and hence are present - by anybody indulging in sociability studies after him.[1]
I. The urban setting
First I will give a short introduction of the various ideological and cultural influences and frameworks that shaped Trieste at the turn of the century, in order to make the following more comprehensible. The point of departure is the structural changes Trieste endured at the turn of the century, evolving from a culturally Italian dominated, yet cosmopolitan merchant town into a bilingual, industrial city that became Austria-Hungary's most important port. Almost paradoxically, it was characterized by both a peak of wealth and an existential national conflict. In addition, the massive and continuous influx of immigrants led to a constant reshuffling of the cityÕs social texture. Identities were very shaky, to say the least, and hovered around the economic link to Austria, the cultural link to Italy, and the emerging of a Slovene national consciousness.
In Trieste, industrialization began in the second half of the 19th century, when the Viennese government launched various economic programs - above all the construction of the new port, which was finished in 1913. Trieste became the most important port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its fourth biggest city after Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.
A rapid population growth was one of the most visible consequences of this development, profoundly changing the city's physiognomy and social texture. Some figures illustrate this: 1890 Trieste had a population of some 155.000, only twenty years later, in 1910, 230.000 people lived there, which means a growth of 80.000 or 50%, and between 1910 and 1914 another 13.000 have to be added. Almost half of Trieste's population had not been born in the city.
Immigrants came from the immediate Slovene and Croat hinterland, from the more distanced Slovene lands, and from Friuli, that is from beyond the state border to the Kingdom of Italy. In fact, in the last years before the outbreak of the war, these socalled regnicoli constituted the vast majority of the immigrants: 1908 there were 24.000, 1911 36.000, and 1913 50.000 living in Trieste. The regnicoli were politically instrumentalized by the Italian nationalists as a "proof" of Trieste's italianitˆ.
This italianitˆ to a good extent was a political construction, though: The urban merchant bourgeoisie by no means was as "purely" Italian as it was depicted by the nationalists, rather it had emerged during the 18th century. In the course of Trieste's development to a free port and important economic city, it had seen the influx of Greek, Armenian, Slavic, Jewish, German, Dutch, English, French, and many Venetian immigrants, who used Italian as the lingua franca of the Adriatic and subsequently italianized more or less. The Triestine bourgeoisie at the beginning of the 20th century thus had a quite cosmopolite basis.
Whereas the earlier generations of immigrants had assimilated into the urban setting without major conflicts, this had changed by the turn of the century. The reasons for this are basically twofold; on the one hand the number of immigrants had multiplied and could not be absorbed that easily; on the other hand the Slovene national movement had progressed and the Slovene society had developed from primarily agrarian to fully-flegged, i.e. now possessing its own bourgeoisie: Trieste had become a bilingual, binational city.
The ethnic conflict in Trieste got its physiognomy partly from the pre-existing contrast between the city and the countryside, in a manner that was different from other Austro-Hungarian cities surrounded by a countryside that was ethnically different, like for example Ljubljana, Maribor or Prague. Trieste's social texture was more complex; it was not only an Italian Žlite confronting the Slovene peasants and the growing Slovene national movement. As I said, the economic Žlite itself was of cosmopolitan origins and italianized to a greater or lesser degree. The autonomistic feelings towards the countryside largely originated in the fact that Trieste was a tax-privileged free port until 1891. When this contrast was inflicted by the ethnic factor, the urban dwellers tended to perceive the Slovene immigrants as "foreigners", even though they might have come to the city from only a few kilometres distance.
The economic growth of the past two centuries of course had not only attracted economically strong investors, but also a large number or artisans and workers in the port, at the construction sites, and in the new industrial factories, and their languages were Italian, Slovene, Croat, and German.
The ethnic conflict in Trieste thus was a conflict between an Žlite belonging to a different ethnic group than the surrounding countryside, but not only. The Italians were present in all social strata, and hence it is impossible to speak of a full correspondence between the ethnic and the social conflict.
It would also be too simple, though, to divide the proletariate simply into speakers of Italian, Slovene, and German. The Italians have to be divided into those who originated in the Austrian Empire and those coming from the Kingdom of Italy, the regnicoli. The Slovenes have to be divided into those coming from the nearer hinterland and those coming from the other Slovene-speaking territories, since the first probably had been in touch both with the city and its dominant language, Italian, before actually deciding to move there, while the latter, if they knew a language other than their mother tongue, more probably knew German, and not Italian, which made their introduction into the city more difficult.
The industrial proletariate in the making thus consisted of people who were quite heterogeneous as far as their ethnicity, their places of origin and their socialization was concerned. No stable social texture could develop before the outbreak of the war, since the city did not grow from inside, but mainly through the influx from outside, constantly reshuffling both working life and social life. Jobs also were precarious and instable: The majority of the workers found unqualified work in the port and on the building sites, whereas the more qualified industrial professions also were only at the beginning of their formation.
The activists of the social democratic movement tried to influence the political, social, and cultural consciousness of this very heterogeneous proletariate still in the making, and they, too, were influenced by two different ideological frameworks.
The Italian-speaking social democrats in Trieste can be called the most internationalist of all Austrian workers' parties. They did away with every emphasis of their nationality, because conscious of the fact that Trieste would have a prosperous future only as a part of Austria. Still, they were influenced by Mazzini and the democratic ideas of the Risorgimento, which brought them into a dilemma, because as the logical consequence of the Risorgimento and the idea of the nation-state connected to it Trieste was to be defined territory irredenta - the Austro-Italian social democrats insisted on remaining in Austria, though, which they wanted to transform into a federal democracy.
Slovene and German-speaking workers, on the other hand, were influenced by socialist ideas of German and German-Austrian imprint, which were brought to Trieste by German and Slovene itinerant workers. The Slovenes from the beginning had been in touch with social democracy through German writings and agitators.
The national self-perception of the Italian and Slovene socialists is mirrored in the names of their respective parties and in the factual organisation that partly contrasted the ambitions. In the course of the division of the Austrian Social Democratic Party into six national groups in 1897, the Partito sociale-democratico del Litorale e della Dalmazia (Social Democratic Party for the Littoral and Dalmatia) and the Jugoslovanska socialnodemokratska stranka (Yugoslav Social Democratic Party) were formed.
The Italian party named itself in an explicitly non-national manner, and only in 1902 the adjective italiana was added to its name, and even now in combination with the word adriatica, drawing a line of demarcation to the other Austro-Italian group in Trentino, and thus maintaining a localistic vision (it was now called Sezione italiana adriatica del partito operaio socialista in Austria, i. e. Italian-adriatic Section of the Socialist Workers' Party in Austria).
The Slovene Party tried, with its name, to underline the South Slav idea and pretended to include all South Slav workers. In fact, however, it was an almost exclusively Slovene party, and what is more, it maintained a localistic vision as well. In 1897 was founded the Okraijna organizacija za volilni okraj Trst, i. e. the local organization for the voting district Trieste, drawing a line of demarcation to the comrades in Ljubljana. Between 1896 and 1918 the executive office of the party was changed four times from Trieste to Ljubljana and back, which mirrors quite aptly the struggle whether to give more importance to national or to social emancipation. The socialists in Ljubljana wanted the office on the grounds that they were situated at the heart of the Slovene national territory, whereas the Triestines motivated the same claim with the fact that their city housed the largest number of the Slovene working class. It is quite obvious that even on the level of parties the lines of national demarcation are not to be drawn simply between Italians and Slovenes.
II. Sociability as a historical category: Associative networking and the construction of national identities
The vast majority of sociability studies chronologically is set between the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, based on the assumption that the phenomenon of institutionalized sociability - i.e. associations of all sorts - functioned as proto-political areas of "exercising" that which later were to become political parties. While this is certainly true, this concept disregards the fact that also, and not only within the working class, after the formation of political parties associations continued to play a crucial role in terms of identity construction and collective group building (in fact, my thesis is to start - not end - with the year of the foundation of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, in 1888); moreover, this concept limits history writing to the "political" in the narrower sense. Only recently the focus shifted towards a more cultural understanding of the concepts of "nationalization" and "class-building", now conceived of as ways of life, as mentalities, to be studied in the larger framework of a changing world going from predominantly agrarian to industrialized, and towards modernity. That is to say that not only those sources revealing institutional, structural, and social aspects are to be included, but also those telling about the ritual and symbolic dimensions - the Weltanschauungen and the continuities and discontinuities to be found in their cultural expressions -, like speeches, songs, poems, commemorations and festivities.[2]
Moreover, research in the field - at least as far as linguistically accessible to me - almost exclusively deals with Western Europe, i.e, with the "classical" nation-state (France, Germany, Italy). Yet, I find it much more challenging to study a multiethnic setting, where society was criss-crossed by plurifold national, social, and cultural frameworks (as I have tried to describe above). It is still to be seen whether the structural findings valid for Western Europe can be confirmed for the more complex settings in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe.[3]
Refering back to our discussion of the "European" dimension of writing history, it seems relevant to point out that I find myself - an indicative coincidence - as part of a group of younger scholars studying the North Adriatic who are characterized by at least two aspects formerly virtually non-existent in the region's historiography: They come from "outside" (Germany, Napoli etc.) and not from the region, and they take into consideration sources in two, three, or even four languages (Italian, Slovene, Croat, German), thus overcoming the national and nation-statal division powerfully persisting in the region's historiography (and in real life, for that matter, which is why this new way of looking at history might be of some importance). I fully agree to Amaia that there can be hardly anything more aptly "European" than the overcoming of thinking in national or nation-statal frameworks.
Prior to the First World War, Trieste saw the development of a rather vast and multifold proletarian associative network. In terms of the ways in which identities were created and enforced both within the working class and outwardly towards the "Other", the definition of both the self and the "Other" proved particularly complex in Trieste, as it may be seen not only in varying national terms - the co-existence of Italian, Slovene, and German workers made internationalism particularly challenging - but also in social terms, with the bourgeoisie also being nationally threefold at the least.
Furthermore, any reflection on identity and the image of the "other" encounters a methodological problem, since the question itself runs danger to become self-fulfilling, emphasizing, if not polarizing the national contrast. It is, however, not so obvious that social settings were guided by this mental scheme of encounters of others with other others. In fact, studying associations I encounter much more complex and "fluid" realities, which only crudely simplifying I could divide into clear cut groups. Referring back to our discussion of two weeks ago about the representativity of sources, where we talked mainly about the "upper" level, i.e. the rhetoric, reflective political discourse to be encountered in newspapers, studying associative life and cultural praxis is situated, so to speak, on a "lower" societal level. Of course I also deal with the "representative", i. e. the reflective side of discourses. But this is very much juxtaposed to findings of spontaneous, everyday behaviour, which allow deductions as to how the discourse filters down to the "everyday" level of life, and how also popular traditions and mentalities influenced the putting into praxis of rhetorics and ideologies.
Speaking about national identities, of course it is true that at the beginning of any national movement there is the discovery and the cultivation of a historical, cultural and social identity of one's own, drawing clear cut lines of demarcation towards other identities. These growing differences in the affermation of national movements in the ethnically mixed regions of Central Europe became almost inadvertently the real reason of the conflict. The struggles between given ethnic groups certainly were carried out in an accentuated manner on the higher level of politics and public discourse. Within the social structures of medium level, however, as are the cultural associations, there is to be found a much more amalgamated reality, with much less clearcut demarcations. The various ways of living together to an equal extent included encounters without any problem and encounters characterized by contrast, and anything that might be imagined in between. All this is quite a way from a concept of juxtaposition of one determined identity towards another.
What is more, the concept of identity itself has to be seen in a differentiated manner, as every person can define himself or herself as belonging to various collective identities. Mechanisms of social and national consciousness, for example, partly relativize and partly enforce each other, and the perception of a given nationality also varied considerably. The various forms of changes between national identities, motivated by social assimilation or political conversion, are another important aspect to be considered.
Studying cultural associations is interdisciplinary; it is situated at the borders between history, socio-cultural studies, and ethnology.[4] To quote what Peter insisted on in the discussion of his own paper several weeks ago, it is a study not of the invention of traditions, but of cultural patterns or adaptations in the course of constructing identities, situated at the linkage point between "conscious" and "unreflected" constructions of identity. In the complicated and evasive situation of pre-war Trieste, it could not be more than an only scarcely persistent attempt to build an "alternative culture" (to use Vernon Lidtke's phrase)[5], that was truncated by the war before it could really take off, only to find itself in a completely changed setting in 1919, trying to embark on a work of continuity, while absorbing new ideas (communism, bolshevism), only to be truncated again by the prohibition of all socialist (and all Slovene) associations by the Fascist regime in 1927.