These stanzas are from an 1842 poem titled “Origin of the Bora,” which recounted the mythical genesis of the strong northeasterly winds that since time immemorial have plagued Adriatic sailors. In the poem, the Bora was no mere weather pattern, but instead the reincarnation of the Slavic nation searching for its slain heroes, the Uskoci pirates made famous in the writings of the seventeenth-century Venetian philosopher Paolo Sarpi and twenty-first-century historian Wendy Bracewell. In typical nineteenth-century Romantic style, the “Origin of the Bora” revealed how the winds (the soul of the sisters of the Uskoci, the Dalmatian womenfolk) blew upon the waters frantically searching for the corpses of their menfolk whom the Venetians and Germans had slain. These winds were relentless—they would never stop their frenzied quest—until the Uskoci heroes were returned home and their spirits were once again able to wield their swords along the “Illyrian contradas.” In the meantime, the poem warned, “Woe to any German or Venetian boat that advances … Their sails will fall in a heartbeat,/ And with the opposition of the wind they will be done for.”

This essay aims to shed light on the ways in which several empires, states, and nationalist movements competed for political power in the Adriatic space. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which international, national, and local narratives converged in the critical political and economic space of the Adriatic Sea both before and after World War I to justify territorial appropriation. The possibility of geopolitical changes triggered by the Great War whetted the territorial appetites of the new nation-states that had established themselves on the ruins of multinational empires in 1918. At the same time, the same possibilities spurred Italian irredentist aspirations, as Italy directed its imperial policy increasingly toward the East. Hence, the phrase “Scramble for Africa,” which prompted the title of this article, can also be applied to the Adriatic space in the same period.

Throughout history, Mediterranean cultures have tried to appropriate, with words or weapons, the sea that surrounds them. Sometimes called the “Inner Sea,” “Superior Sea,” or “Great Sea,” the Mediterranean was designated by the Greeks—as the Odyssey testifies—as theirs, “Our Sea.” In the 1920s, Mussolini revived the Latin mare nostrum to justify the “Italian-ness” of the Mediterranean (and, by extension, of the Adriatic Sea and its immediate eastern coastline, Dalmatia), an act that marked a new step in a long-term process that placed the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas at the core of national identity politics. Yugoslav ascriptions of the adjective “Yugoslav,” or even “Slavic,” to the Adriatic Sea during the interwar period proceeded from the same desire: to appropriate a space in order to articulate a national discourse.

For Fernand Braudel, the early modern adriatic appeared, as it did on Venetian maps, as the Golfo di Venezia. Venice, ruling also over the Dalmatian coast and the Ionian Islands, controlled shipping on the Adriatic and made the Adriatic into the Venetian basis for commercial activity all over the eastern Mediterranean. Braudel also credited to Venice the establishment of an Italian cultural sphere of influence around the Adriatic: “The gulf was Venetian, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was more than this; it was the sphere of a triumphant Italian culture. The civilization of the peninsula wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea.” Braudel, carrying out his research in the 1930s and publishing in 1949, might have been well aware that the Italian trans-Adriatic presence, even when triumphant—as in the case of Mussolini's occupation of Dalmatia—might not be something to celebrate as brilliant. Furthermore, reconsidering the early modern Adriatic, one might today wonder whether the term “Italian”—with its modern national meaning—should be used with caution in describing early modern cultural influence. Indeed, one might simply suggest that Venetian power on the Adriatic was the vehicle of Venetian culture—not Italian culture—on the Adriatic, an early modern imperial rather than a modern national idiom, and present even at Ragusa, which was independent of Venice.

At first glance, the three essays that make up this forum dedicated to the Adriatic appear to chart a fairly standard course for scholarship on the region, depicting the area as one transected by conflict and contest or, alternatively, as a site of cultural mixing and coexistence. The reader quickly realizes, however, that all three authors offer innovative analyses that challenge, even as they build on, the body of work exploring the political and cultural contours of the Adriatic in the modern era. Much of this scholarship reiterates a reductive view of the Adriatic that sees it principally through the narrow prism of competing Italian and Slavic nationalist claims. Although Dominique Reill, Igor Tchoukarine, and Borut Klabjan address Italo-(South)Slav tensions and dialogues, they locate them in much broader frameworks that oblige the reader to rethink understandings of both the contents of these nationalisms and the contexts within which they developed. In different ways, for example, these papers highlight a seemingly obvious but little explored fact: The object of so much contestation and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just land, but also the sea that lapped the shores of the Adriatic territories.

Center and periphery are popular concepts to describe geographical, political, or economic power relations. Both are mostly perceived as strict and mutually exclusive categories. This article examines a Galician border town whose history illustrates the complexities of conceptualizing center and periphery relations. At first glance, nineteenth-century Brody (in today's Ukraine) would seem to qualify as a peripheral town located on the Galician border between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. An analysis of this city under Habsburg rule (1772–1918), however, shows us that during that period it constituted both an important center and a declining periphery, not only consecutively, but also simultaneously. Its situation on the country's physical and political periphery did not harm Brody's central role in Europe's East-West trade until the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. Only in later decades did the city lose its place within a modernizing commercial system, and eventually it declined in importance. If we leave aside the economic aspect and take a closer look at Brody's mostly Jewish inhabitants, we see that for centuries this city functioned as an important center for Eastern and Central European Jewry. Even though the town's centrality for Jewish history also changed over time, Brody nevertheless kept its place on Jewish mental maps, whether as a center of religious learning, as a pioneering site of political emancipation, or as a safe haven for Jewish refugees.

Between the Revolution of 1848 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, imperial Austria experienced an extraordinary expansion of nationalism and of national conflict. German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Slovene, and other national movements became major players and rivals, transforming public life in the process. This essay examines that process through a municipal lens. What was particular about the intersection of the national in imperial Austria with the municipal? How did municipal and national politics affect one another, and what can we understand, through their dynamics, about Austrian politics more generally?

At midday on Thursday, 1 May 1873, the Emperor Francis Joseph I officially opened the Fifth World's Fair in Vienna. Timed to coincide with the emperor's twenty-fifth anniversary, the fair aimed to confirm the status of Austria-Hungary as a major European power and as an advanced industrial and economic state. As the opening address of Archduke Karl Ludwig to the emperor asserted, the fair served to “direct the gaze of the world toward Austria and ensure the recognition of the participation of our fatherland in the promotion of the wellbeing of mankind through work and instruction.” Its significance was signalled by the presence at the opening ceremony of, among others, Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Edward Prince of Wales, and the Crown Prince of Denmark, with their spouses.

The Hungarian Republic, which emerged from of the ashes of Austria-Hungary, experienced two revolutions between October 1918 and April 1919. However, neither the democratic regime nor the more radical Soviet Republic born in these revolutions was able to solve the country's most pressing economic and social problems. The collapse of the Soviet Republic at the end of July 1919, in turn, was followed by a rapid rise in extra-legal violence. Freikorps units (szabadcsapatok) and civic guards (polgárőrségek), aided by the members of the local police, set up kangaroo courts, organized summary executions, and ignited pogroms in the central and western parts of the country.

Before the United States entered World War II, major Hollywood studios had been slow to produce films critical of the Nazi regime. In addition to fearing that such films would alienate the lucrative European market and run counter to the United States’ policy of neutrality, film industry executives were mindful, too, that anti-Nazi films could well worsen the situation of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territories. Attuned to anti-immigrant feelings in the United States, they also appeared reticent to depict the lot of refugees from Hitler. If the studios’ prime objective was to make the most profit while entertaining audiences, those running the studios might have viewed taking a stand on controversial issues as counterproductive. MGM's full-length film, Florian (1940), however, proved something of an exception. In this case, a light-entertainment film doubled as a palimpsest for commentary on some of the most critical events of the day.

In Tony Judt's historical essay on postwar Europe's political myths, Austria serves as a paradigmatic case for national cultures of commemoration that successfully suppressed their societies’ involvement in National Socialism. According to Judt, the label of “National Socialism's First Victim” was applied to a country that after the Anschluss of March 1938 had, in fact, been a real part of Nazi Germany. “If Austria was guiltless, then the distinctive responsibilities of non-German nationals in other lands were assuredly not open to close inspection,” notes Judt. When the postwar Austrian myth of victimhood finally disintegrated during the Waldheim debate, critics deemed the “historical lie” of the “first victim” to have been the basis for Austria's failure to confront and deal with its own Nazi past. Yet, one of the paradoxes of Austrian memory is the fact that soon after the end of the war, the victim thesis had already lost much of its relevance for many Austrians.

Forty-five years ago, in May 1966, Professor Robert A. Kann delivered a paper titled “Should the Habsburg Empire Have Been Saved? An Exercise in Speculative History.” The venue was the spring banquet of the Phi Alpha Theta History Society, held at the State University College of New York in Cortland. The theme was provocative and on a subject of much discussion about the fate of the empire and its implications for Europe. Kann never expanded it for publication.

The observations which I shall put before you require the kind of apology that is always necessary when the historian leaves the ground of facts and turns to the hazy realm of what might have been or ought to be. Still there may be extenuating factors for an undertaking of this kind. I refer here, of course, to the frequently voiced assumption of the value of hindsight prophecies for the prevention of errors in the future, the wishful thinking that may generate appropriate action and, in a more general way, the training of the mind that may derive from speculative thinking.

James Robert (Bob) Wegs died, after a long struggle with lymphoma, on 14 July 2010. He was too much a scholar of modern Europe for it not to be mentioned that this was Bastille Day. A passionate and dedicated historian of Austria, Wegs served throughout the 1990s on the editorial board of the Austrian History Yearbook and the Executive Committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History. His career reflects a certain chapter of U.S. history even as it forms part of the dynamic historiography of Central Europe.