Bernard MEARES - Where the Balkans begin

    At the south-eastern corner of Trieste Province a narrow river valley winds between pine forest and scree down from the Karst plateau. From the lip of this plateau you gaze down over a land of persimmons, vines and olives across valley villages like Boljunec/Bagnoli and Dolina/San Dorligo della Valle. They must have been beautiful in the past, the kind of land where the hand of Man fits snugly into the hand of God. They are still charming places with arched brown-stone courtyards, churches and a different dialect of Slovene to that spoken on the Karst or in the city. But the village of Boljunec is now overshadowed by a horrendous marine diesel engine plant called Grandi Motori; the sloping village of Dolina seems squeezed against the hills by a row of 12 huge petroleum storage tanks; and a third village called Kostisce is followed by the sprawl of a half-empty industrial estate. The valley is split in two by a largely unused motorway snaking up to two 20-storey blockhouses, the Cattinara hospital; while across the Cattinara hill a third immense high-rise rectangle, called the Falansterio, provides low-cost housing for perhaps 1500 families. How, you think, did the authorities ever get away with such unrestricted development? Then common sense takes over and fills your remarks with clichés like "Oh, but this is Italy", or "you can't stop progress", or "Trieste is a small province, hemmed in by Slovenia on its land side". But then you think: "Yes, but the sheer scale of the developments is a bit strange isn't it? For a port in such decline as Trieste, with no raw materials, no hinterland, and in a forgotten corner of Italy, that is not even really Italy?" Only then will some Slovene tell you that this too is ethnic cleansing.

    Not all the population movements in the Trieste Province can be termed ethnic cleansing, however. Everywhere in Europe new towns and industrial areas were set up by governments after the war. Such developments were often social, economic and political failures, straining the fabric of the communities they have swamped. And included in such phenomena in Italy were the movements that fed the Italian economic miracle of the North, even though it may have come to an abrupt halt at the gates to Trieste. These would not have spared Trieste even if there had been no nationalist bid to marginalize the Slovenes. The development of infrastructure, the greater ease of movement, and above all the decline of Trieste would all have caused governments to throw money and manpower at the city. But for all the subsidies the Italian economic boom of the nineteen-sixties has passed Trieste by. The population has scarcely increased since the end of the war. The influx of refugees has been accompanied by an exodus of manpower skilled in the industries that made Trieste the boom city of the Austrian Empire. There is a continuing haemorrhaging of shipbuilding and maritime skills and insurance know-how (insurance is still a major industry in Trieste), and a brain drain of managers. As usual it has not spared the Slovenes, often the first to leave. The population, including the Slovenes, is aging rapidly.
    Among Italians who have not left Trieste Province, there have been simultaneous moves out of the city centre, as elsewhere in Italy and Western Europe. Trieste experiences great discomfort from pollution and the huge numbers of cars cluttering the city streets. With the dramatic increase in mobility and greater accessibility of Trieste's formerly remote Karst hinterland, much of the once Slovene-owned rural housing is snapped up by Italians from the city, as happened in Wales, where the craze for second homes often cut local families out of the housing market, and helped destroy the local community.
    This is partly because incomers often do little to keep the existing social fabric intact, preferring to wall themselves up in their chic homes and do their shopping down in the city or at the hypermarket, and socializing among their own kind rather than having any contact with their Slav neighbours, let alone learning Slovene or sending their children to local Slovene schools. I have had remarks reported to me such as "Oh, those peasants, what do I have in common with a (Karst Slovene) farmer?", by non-Slovenes who have bought and vamped up distinctive traditional Karst properties to make them look more picturesque than they were. But the same thing would happen in Ireland, Wales, Scotland or England, or anywhere else in Europe.
    However, given modern Italian taste, in the Trieste area the result is not always picturesque, unless picturesqueness includes over-investment in concrete and glass, ritzy developments surrounded by high walls topped by broken glass or barbed wire, electronic anti-theft precautions, and the other paraphernalia of guilt and alienation that make parts of Italianized villages resemble white suburbs under siege in South Africa. Indeed with the myriads of savage dogs in the smarter Italian Karst suburbs one wonders with whom such people do have things in common. Parts of the tarted-up villages dotting the forests of the Karst plateau five hundred feet above Trieste, like Basovizza, Prosecco and Opcina, resemble the Gower Peninsula of South Wales, all Tories and gentrification. Triestino Slovenes have said to me about the townspeople of Trieste who do much of the buying: "Oh you can't blame them for building on the Karst; there's such a difference with Trieste -- I know they have good reason to come up here." Though Slovene nationalists see the drift to the Karst as outright colonization, in recent years ethnic cleansing has often simply been car-driven.

    It must also be said that the gentrification and Italianization of the Karst countryside is partly the work of the Slovene community, enriching themselves from the sale of land. They use their profits gained from turning their farms into farm holiday centres to do up their properties. They trade farms or land for flats in Trieste city centre, also benefitting from the rise in living standards. No matter how we may bemoan the cultural dilution or linguistic erosion that results, we have no right to complain about them improving their living standards. At least, not until we have spent ten years in a quaint house opening onto a draughty Karst courtyard in the middle of the winter gales. And though it may be regrettable that Slovenes switch ever more frequently into Italian, it is not the task of others, with our out-of-town arguments, to stop them from doing so if it makes life easier. Being the member of an ethnic minority is a full-time job, whereas being American, British, Italian or French, or even a Slovene from independent Slovenia is infinitely more relaxing. We have no right to criticize when members of a minority want to quit, take a golden handshake, or move elsewhere.

    The Slovene government in Ljubljana recently missed out on a great opportunity to help its minorities outside the country, in Austria and Hungary as well as in Italy, by failing to take up a TV satellite channel slot that could have been used to beam down Slovene programming to them without political concessions to governments of the surrounding countries. All that the minority has been able to do is to join together with other minorities in the area (the Slovene minority in Austria and the Italian minority in Slovenia and Croatia) to pool TV programming and to tap into the various minority language networks mushrooming across Europe. Much more must be done to retain the interest of the younger generation. Otherwise, in 20 years time I doubt whether many Slovenes will be left in Trieste, once a major centre of Slovene culture.
    Little progress can be expected unless the Slovene minorities in Italy, Hungary and Austria (where they are also under great pressure) stiffen their sinews, and behave like the Czechs in nineteenth-century Prague, the founders of the Zionist movement, the Basques and the Irish. This means refusing the easy way out, and insisting on Slovene as the only language they will speak in public or in private. That's what the Germans in the Alto Adige do, and what Welsh speakers do to the English. It may be rude, but it is effective. The Slovenes, like Bretons and Scots Gaelic speakers, unfortunately suffer from national diffidence and hide behind politeness a justifiable unwillingness to create problems.
    But they should start shaking the Italian State up a bit. One way of doing so is to take it or the local Trieste authorities to court when they fail to comply with their commitments, as was done by Samo Pahor, the historian who used the law to fight Italian encroachment on Slovene privileges, demanding the services of a Slovene interpreter in court cases and so forth. Slovenes should start using the European Court in Strasbourg, and the various bodies in Brussels and the Hague. Inter alia they could get subsidies for multicultural activities withheld until Italy acts for real instead of simply play-acting its bilingualism or flaunting its dubious multicultural credentials. Until it muzzles its inner advocates of race hatred. Until it stops cosseting the rabid Italian Right in Trieste, "the most overprotected minority in the world" as one Slovene wit has called it.
    The problems of the Slovene minority may be great but, as with the Hebrew and Czech revivals of the nineteenth century, God helps those who help themselves. They could make a start by adopting a slogan like: "To je tvoj jezik; rabi ga". [It's your language, use it].
    In short they must start being rude.
    But it may in any case be too late "Resistance is useless," to paraphrase Startrek, "You will be assimilated."