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This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their analyses of competing historical claims to “our Adriatic.” The comment focuses on questions raised about ownership of the sea and the Adriatic's borders of belonging. While sovereignty over areas of the Adriatic has proven an enduring diplomatic issue in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the forum authors instead consider claims by different types of actors: tourists (particularly Czech tourists who claimed a special relationship between Czechs and their South Slav “brothers”); investors in hotels and related infrastructure; socialist Yugoslav tourism planners; and environmentalists concerned with issues of pollution. In tracing out tensions in the agendas of hosts and visitors, as well as planners and scientists, the forum's essays measure and map the socio-ecological metabolism of the modern eastern Adriatic.

This chapter explores the history of migration in Italy. Migration has preoccupied both the Italian state and students of Italy since Italian unification in 1861. From almost the beginning of its existence, the Italian state had been concerned with protecting its emigrants, on the one hand, and seeking to contain the potentially disruptive effects of migration, on the other. As life for Italians in former territories in Africa or the Balkans became untenable, the Italian state found itself tasked with humanitarian and political responsibilities defined in contradistinction to and in dialogue with those assumed by the postwar intergovernmental refugee regimes. At the same time, however, the Italian state's response to flows from the lost possessions involved nongovernmental and intergovernmental actors—often in novel ways. The chapter then brings the insights of international history and recent findings on internationalisms to bear on understandings of Italian state-making in both its national and imperial forms. It also looks at the competing and entangled models of colonialism.

This chapter assesses how the efforts by the Italian state at certain moments to slow processes of repatriation by requiring guarantees of work and housing proved merely stopgap measures. Despite worries about the potentially destabilizing effect of introducing impoverished Italian repatriates and refugees into an Italian peninsula devastated by the war, the Italian government worried equally about the corrosive consequences of lengthy residence in refugee camps on its inhabitants, as well as for neighboring communities. This prospect carried with it the risks of ruination not only of the generation of adults displaced by the war and the collapse of fascist empire but also of succeeding generations raised in the camps. Examining debates about how to reclaim the children of Italy's lost empire for the nation after 1945, the chapter explores such questions through the prism of resettlement policies and refugee housing. In particular, it asks whether these efforts can be read as instantiations of the famous fascist projects of land reclamation and thus as attempts to reclaim and render productive the ruins of the fascist project.

This book explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions—colonies, protectorates, and provinces—in Africa and the Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these “national refugees” into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, the book focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees. The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. The book's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.

This chapter situates the story of relief to both national and foreign refugees in Italy in the immediate postwar years within the entangled internationalisms and Italian struggles to reassert and reframe sovereignty in the aftermath of defeat. Although the concept of intergovernmentalism only originated in the 1960s in the context of nascent European integration, in practice it proved a key aspect of interwar and early postwar politics. Indeed, the retrenchment after 1945 of the nation-state in the international state system gained its most obvious expression in the creation of a series of intergovernmental institutions, including the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies (such as UNRRA, the IRO, and finally the UNHCR). In the realm of refugees, these agencies quite literally mediated between the realms of the state and the international; the UNHCR's statute gave expression to this interstitial role with its requirement that aid provided by states to the displaced be distributed through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In addition, decolonization—which took as its goal national independence and sovereignty—reaffirmed the centrality of the statist principle undergirding the United Nations. The chapter then considers UNRRA's Dodecanese Mission and the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy.

This chapter examines how Italy's loss of empire and debates over classifying displacees produced a binary citizenship regime whose primary differentiation lay between citizens and aliens. Though the citizen/alien distinction seems commonsensical and unremarkable today, it was rearticulated in postwar Italy through the process of reckoning with the dual displacements of decolonization and war. The chapter studies these post-1945 transformations, first offering a brief discussion of the development of Italian citizenship codes during the era of imperial expansion before turning to detailed analysis of those displaced persons whose statuses challenged and tested the limits of Italian republican citizenship, as well as the incipient category of international refugee. In theory, the distinctions that emerged after 1945 in Italy between citizen and foreigner—like those between national refugee and international refugee—were clear. However, in practice there existed a good deal of ambiguity and debate as to who should or would help Italy's “own” refugees. These debates over assistance reflected deeper dilemmas over determining just who among the displaced counted as an Italian.