48/1 - Qualestoria. Rivista di storia contemporanea. XLVIII, N.ro 1, Giugno 2020

Cephalonia: a non-shared History The armistice of 8th September 1943 causes the disintegration of the Italian army. In Athens, the Commander of Italian troops in Greece, in contravention of the provisions of Rome, signs the surrender to the Nazis on 9th September. In Chephalonia, the commander of the garrison tries to obtain repatriation of the Acqui division without bloodshed. His behavior is ambiguous but, forced by the attitude of the troops and the order to resist from Rome, he opposes the German requests. After seven days of fighting, the Acqui division surrenders and, following the order given by Hitler in person, the Germans begin shooting the soldiers and most of the officers, including the Commander. Once the war is over, an operation is organized to defend the Commander’s memory from the accusation of excessive surrender to the enemy and serious errors in conducting the fight. Investigations and court proceedings follow, which provide material for a distorted reconstruction of the events that took place on the island. The article examines the causes of these manipulations.

This paper investigates the relation between violence and state-building in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular I analyse the way in which the experience of violence conditioned Albanians’ positioning toward their national identity and their state-building endeavours. In analogy to many studies published on the topic of violence and statebuilding, the research shows that violence against Italians and Yugoslavs who threatened the integrity of Albanian territorial claims and Albanian individuals or groups who were considered a menace to the national cause, contributed to consolidate the feelings of national solidarity and to legitimate Albanian claims for self-determination. However, differently from most of current recent research, the analysis of the events displays that violence for state-building purposes had complex ethical and political implications which hindered the coherence of the Albanian national discourse and the state-building projections that it entailed. The employment of coercive means exposed Albanians’ vulnerability to the violence of internal and external actors who instead exploited violence to delegitimise Albanian self-determination claims. State-building violence created dissidence between Albanian political circles, generated contestation against the authority of the government and led political actors to question the overall value and function of their nation-state-building endeavours.

«Qualestoria» è la rivista dell’Irsml FVG, fondata nel 1973 come «Bollettino dell’Istituto regionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione nel Friuli Venezia Giulia». Ospita contributi di autori italiani e stranieri, promuovendo la pubblicazione di numeri monografici e miscellanei. La rivista propone tradizionalmente tematiche legate alla storia contemporanea dell’area alto-adriatica e delle zone di frontiera, rivolgendo particolare attenzione allo studio e alla storiografia dei paesi dell’Europa centro-orientale e balcanica. Le proposte di pubblicazione vanno inviate all’indirizzo e-mail della redazione. Saranno preventivamente valutate da esperti interni ed esterni al comitato di direzione. I saggi pubblicati nella sezione «Studi e ricerche» sono sottoposti in forma anonima a double-blind peer review. «Qualestoria» è attualmente presente nei seguenti indici: Bibliografia storica nazionale, Catalogo italiano dei periodici (Acnp), Essper, Gbv (Gemainsame Bibliotheksverbund), Google Scholar, Res. È inoltre inserita dall’Anvur nella lista delle riviste scientifiche ai fini dell’abilitazione scientifica nazionale. La rivista non si intende impegnata dalle interpretazioni e vedute espresse da articoli e note firmati.

Romania and the Annexations of Transylvania and Bessarabia in the First Post-War Period At the end of WWI, after the annexation of the regions of Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia, Romania doubled its territory and consequently had to cope with the non-Romanian populations – new ethnic and religious minorities – which were included within its borders. In order to nationalize the Greater Romania, the Romanian ruling class resorted to centralizing policies, setting aside the requests for regional autonomy which had been part of the Transylvanian and Bessarabian national movements’ programs. Meanwhile, Greater Romania could rely on the support of the Western powers, earned as a bulwark against Hungarian communism and Russian Bolshevism in central and south-eastern Europe.

Post-War Yugoslavia: a Modern History of Social Conflict and Control The article aims at examining the post-war transition in Yugoslavia through the lens of the social conflict broadly speaking, ie. considering social tensions, discourses, and official measures taken for managing the socially marginal actors like prostitutes and beggars. The goal is testing, from this point of view, the most recent historiographical thesis about “phantom-borders” and post-imperial legacies. A second goal is to consider to what extent one of the most established approach for interpreting the experience of the first Yugoslavia, ie. focusing on the national conflicts, is useful for enlightening the postwar social transition of that country.