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22 Liquid Borderland, Inelastic Sea? MAPPING THE EASTERN ADRIATIC Pamela Ballinger Writing of the Mediterranean, Predrag Matvejević has argued, “Its boundaries are drawn in neither space nor time. There is in fact no way of drawing them: they are neither ethnic nor historical, state nor national; they are like a chalk circle that is constantly traced and erased, that the winds and waves, that obligations and inspirations expand or reduce.”1 This conceptualization of the Mediterranean owes much to Matvejević’s personal experiences of (and on) the Adriatic, a body of water he deems a “sea of intimacy.”2 In attributing a fundamental indeterminacy to the Adriatic and the larger Mediterranean Sea of which it forms a part, Matvejević highlights a characteristic of most borderzones or borderlands: at different historical moments or in different contexts, they may figure as sites of coexistence or violent conflict, rigidity or fluidity, purity or hybridity. For the Mediterranean, for example, Bromberger has identified opposed “polyphonic” and “cacophonic” models, associated respectively with the metaphors of bridge and wall.3 These understandings of maritime border regions share much in common with representations of the largely terrestrial imperial shatterzones detailed in this volume, yet seas and watery spaces usually do not come to mind when discussing those East European borderlands that nurtured both coexistence and genocidal violence in the twentieth century . In this chapter, I argue that contests to define and possess terrestrial borderlands in the Adriatic region of southeastern Europe have not only extended into the watery realm but also that the sea itself has proven a key element in the construction of symbolic geographies that map some groups onto territories to which they are said to “belong” and which exclude others. 424 Pamela Ballinger Seas: Spaces of Fluidity? Matvejević’s vision of the porous boundaries of the Mediterranean accords with a common view of seas as spaces of both literal and metaphorical fluidity, as media that confound efforts to draw rigid boundaries. Of late, watery metaphors have proven popular among theorists seeking to characterize the globalized post–Cold War order in terms that capture flux and mobility. Stefan Helmreich, for instance, deems water a “theory machine” for contemporary anthropology.4 Zygmunt Bauman has gone so far as to define a new phase of modernity as “liquid,” expressed in his belief that “‘fluidity’ or ‘liquidity’ [are] fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity.”5 Despite the vogue for using watery metaphors to capture the fluidity of the globalized world, along the contemporary Adriatic understandings of actual (rather than metaphorical) seawater suggest that sites of literal fluidity may not necessarily be sites of fluid or elastic understandings of territory. Since 1992, I have conducted field research in varied locales in the northeastern Adriatic, ranging from Trieste (Italy) to Piran (Slovenia) to Savudrija, Rovinj, and Lošinj (Croatia). I have investigated topics ranging from memories of the post-1945 exodus from the Istrian peninsula after it passed from Italian to Yugoslav control, to contemporary debates over privatization along the Croatian coast, to efforts to establish a marine protected area off the island of Lošinj. In all of these examples I have found that the sea figures prominently as a marker of identity and that inhabitants of the region often conceive of the sea not so much as a fluid space but as one delimited by boundaries, a vision embodied in cartographic representations of the Adriatic cut through by the rigid vectors of state borders. It does not prove surprising, perhaps, that in the realm of state sovereignty, seaspace does not always carry with it associations of fluidity. The notion of the “high seas” as free dates only to the seventeenth century, for example, with its articulation by Dutch jurist Hugo de Groot (Grotius) in his 1609 work Mare Liberum. Grotius’ advocacy of common access to the sea and its resources (res communis) did not entirely extinguish older ideas and practices of control of the seas (particularly of fisheries) by specific powers, an approach espoused by the Englishmen John Selden in his 1634 Mare Clausum.6 By the twentieth century, international law began to recognize and expand national claims and rights to waters and their associated resources. The 1930 Hague Convention, for instance, provided legal recognition of a narrow band of waters, known as the territorial sea, over which states exercise national sovereignty.7 In the latter half of the twentieth century, the...

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