The Rapallo border: a quarter century of existence and a century of heritage On November 12th, 1920, a treaty was signed between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the Italian town of Rapallo, setting the border between the two countries after WWI. Italy obtained a third of Slovenian ethnic territory or over 300,000 Slovenians. After the border was settled, it was officially marked with boundary stones. There were more than 5,000 boundary stones altogether, and a quarter or fewer have been preserved. Despite the border agreement, both sides began fortifying the border. On the Italian side, the fortification increased after 1931, when the Italians started building a larger number of forts and barracks connected into the so called “Alpine Wall”. On the Yugoslav side major fortification did not start until 1935. The remnants of the fortification are still visible today. After the Second World War, the border between Italy and Yugoslavia moved to the west and significantly closer to the western Slovenian ethnic border. In addition to the material remains, the border left visible marks on Slovenian regional affiliation, thus showing how even a short-lived border can remain in the local population’s consciousness much longer than it existed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 66237794
This article compares the ecclesiastical and civil administrative-territorial divisions of Slovenia, including from a historical perspective, in order to determine their compatibility and applicability for Slovenia’s planned division into regions as an intermediary administrative hierarchy level between the national and municipal level. In addition, it analyses in detail the problem areas in the country’s current ecclesiastical division and assesses them in terms of Slovenian regional identity as determined in a detailed study carried out in 2014 and 2015. The findings show that in principle both divisions are becoming increasingly similar, even though political indecisiveness hinders initiatives for establishing civil regions. With regard to these, however, a division into eight territorial units seems increasingly likely.
COBISS.SI-ID: 42481197
Crossing the border, doing one’s shopping abroad, and travelling had a significant impact on Slovenes’ lifestyle in the post-war decades. The answer to the question whether this improved their sense of quality cuts both ways. The country’s openness certainly impacted the domestic production and trade that strove to match western standards. Shopping abroad exerted additional pressure on politics that was – up to a certain point – forced to comply with consumers’ wishes and act accordingly. It has to be mentioned that shopping was – particularly in the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s – limited due to the low standard of living. In time, a specific consumer ritual established itself, a shopping fever, to which succumbed the majority of Slovenes (and even more Yugoslavs). A typical feature of this type of attitude was that people did not buy merely items that they truly needed. When abroad, they had to “seize the opportunity” to make the journey “worthy of their time and money”, thus purchasing everything that they could lay their hands on. Shopping tourism is merely one of the factors that shaped the specific post-war socialist consumer mentality in Slovenia. Its impact must be assessed in a broader context, alongside films, music, television, mass motorization, the boom of foreign tourism in Slovenia, and the economic emigration. All of this led to the fact that Slovenes have been taking over western standards and patterns of behaviour, residential culture, dressing, and spending leisure time since the “liberal” 1960s. From the early 1970s onwards, for instance, the better-off already had international credit cards, including American Express. People took from socialism what was useful (free education, good health service, full-time employment); meanwhile, the ideology that pervaded political speeches, newspaper articles, and television news was regarded as a necessary evil. Hardly anyone took it seriously in the last two decades of the self-managing socialism. This was probably also due to the fact that critics of the regime as well as politicians and officials bumped into each other while shopping abroad.
COBISS.SI-ID: 66246754