Post-war Settlements in the Adriatic and the Balkans

The rejection of the Italian demand for Fiume led to much anger in Italy; interventionist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio spoke of a ‘mutilated victory’. Capitalizing on nationalist fury he independently led a small group to seize the city directly, creating serious tensions with Yugoslavia. Italian military occupations in neighbouring areas of Dalmatia sought to lay foundations for Italian possession but were unpopular with locals; Italian forces showed signs of growing radical nationalism. By the end of 1920 Italy had been forced to renounce most of its claims and D’Annunzio was forced out of Fiume. Further south in Albania Italy hoped to create a long-lasting protectorate building on its wartime occupation, but here too its colonial approach was unpopular and by August 1920 it had to admit its failure.

Radical-Nationalist Podcasting under a Post-Fascist Condition

This article sketches fascism’s ideological morphology under a post-fascist condition. It builds empirically on three years of ethnographic studies of the radical-nationalist podcast Motgift [Antidote], disclosing that (i) fascist multivocality characterizes and feeds the rhizomic structure of Swedish radical nationalism; (ii) fascist narration locates protagonists and antagonists in driving a plot of ‘genocide against the white race’; and (iii) fascist temporality reinforces ideas of a lost past and degenerated present – prompting a struggle for cultural rebirth and racial revival. The multivocality, narration, and temporality of Motgift illuminate the radical-nationalist politics at work under a post-fascist condition: the state of ideological reconfiguration pondering fascism’s historical downfall.

The politics of reconciliation in contemporary Croatia: from syncretism to “legitimate nationalism”

The process of decommunisation in Central Europe and the Balkans paved the way for new versions of traditionalist and nationalist ideologies. The specific feature of the “new” nationalism which emerged in the 1990s is a combination of radical nationalism with solidarity, which might be defined as a set of doctrinal ideas to provide for the conflict-free existence of right and left political forces within the political system of a country. A remarkable example in this regard is Croatia, which, during the stage of statehood formation in the 1990s, faced the necessity of consolidating and integrating various elite groups who had seen themselves as opponents until the mid-1980s and who had differing concepts of state formation. The emerging ideological formula was called “the politics of reconciliation”. It led to the anchoring in contemporary Croatia of discourses and patterns that were taboo in the communist period, while some significant elements of the leftist tradition were not totally dismantled. This chapter characterizes the ideological aspects of the reconciliation in Croatia, analyzes the most remarkable examples of its implementation in the first 20 years of modern Croatia's history, and analyzes the differences between right and left discourse in 2010s.