Elite Nationalism and the Crumbling of Multi-Ethnic Coexistence: Habsburg Dalmatia and the Language Question in the Wake of Italian Unification

The emergence of Italian nationalism in general, and in Habsburg Dalmatia in particular, has escaped any systematic theorizing in the field of nationalism studies. In the 1860s, changing geopolitical scenarios, resulting from the process of Italian unification, triggered a heated debate among Italian- and Slavic-speaking Dalmatian politicians and intellectuals over the introduction of equal status for the Italian language and Slavic-Dalmatian. Although Italian-speaking Dalmatians constituted a very tiny minority of the population of the Austrian province, the Italian language had a dominant role in public life as a legacy of previous Venetian colonial rule. While the majority of the Slavic-Dalmatian intelligentsia and political elites sought rights for the local Slavic language in public life without undermining the existence of Italian, Italian-speaking elites opposed measures aimed at language equality in their attempt to maintain their privileged position within Dalmatian society. In the same period, Niccolò Tommaseo emerged as the leading figure against any concessions to Slavs, thus distancing himself from his previous “multinational” ideas and igniting anti-Slavic Italian nationalism in the region. And the nationalist tropes used by Italian-speaking Dalmatians, Tommaseo included, mirrored the very same primordialist rhetoric of modern-day nationalist leaders, from Russia to China.