The Former Austrian Littoral and the Rediscovery of Ethnic Cleansing

This paper addresses two distinct issues. The first is the emergence of a variety of an interpretative paradigms within Nationalism Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The second is the actual use of an interpretative model derived from such debates, with special reference to the former Austrian Littoral. Nationalism Studies re-emerged in the 1980s out of the convergent efforts of historians and social scientists on both sides of the Cold War divide. The more specific issues of genocide and ethnic cleansing were not central to that debate, except as issues which belonged to a relatively distant past. This radically changed in the 1990s, when the issues re-emerged for a variety of reasons, not least the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution and the massacres in Rwanda. It led, on the one hand, to a normative turn in Nationalism Studies (which were no longer expected to explain, but also to judge the historical legitimacy of national claims), on the other, to a hasty re-discovery of historical cases (which, in fact, had never been neglected, let alone forgotten). In recent discussions of the Austrian Littoral in the period 1918-1948 the final turn of events in the region has been explained by some authors as the result of the partly “Eastern European” nature of the region. It is argued that this paradigm of ethnic cleansing may be challenged, and a more nuanced perspective can be applied to the historical problem of the Austrian Littoral