HISTORY OF THE ALPS, 1500 - 1900: ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT, AND SOCIETY

1. The Alps: A Historical Space?

5 1 The Alps: A Historical Space? The winter of 1988–89 witnessed two events whose importance for the history analyzed in this book was greater than one might imagine. In November 1988 the presidents of the three Alpine working communities, ALPS ADRIATIC, ARGE ALP, and COTRAO, met in Lugano, Switzerland for a conference that was intended to be the first in a series of meetings between regional administrative leaders. In an unrelated development, the German minister of the environment announced in January 1989 that he planned to invite his counterparts from all of the countries with Alpine regions to a conference at Berchtesgaden. The conference was held later that year. Then, on 7 November 1991, these ministers signed a framework agreement for an Alpine Convention whose details remained to be worked out. By this agreement, the countries involved (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia [later Slovenia], Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and eventually Monaco), along with the European Community, committed to a specific policy of environmental protection and development for their Alpine regions. The detailed definition of the territory in which they pledged to follow this policy was itself included in the Convention agreement. Despite (or even because of) its definition by state officials, this territory was much more a function of geographic data than were the territories of the aforementioned Alpine working communities Chapter One 6 from across the Alpine arc. The territories represented by the working communities included both real Alpine zones and large amounts of surrounding areas—examples included the Yugoslav republic of Croatia and the entire Rhône-Alps region in France. However one wanted to define it, in the years around 1990 the Alpine arc became, for the first time in its history, a space in which the first elements of a common political and administrative structure were being developed.1 The preliminary conditions for these events are to be found in representations of the Alps and related discourses whose roots reach far back in time. But at the institutional level, these new structures were a product of the postwar years, after 1970 in particular. The organization that provided the chief impetus for the Alpine Convention , CIPRA (The International Commission for the Protection of the Alps), was founded in 1952 as an offshoot of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (which had in turn been created in 1948 by UNESCO). During the 1950s and 1960s CIPRA became involved in issues relating to the protection of nature in transnational contexts, but it remained a small organization that was dependent on initiatives taken by single individuals, and its activities eventually stopped. It was revived in 1974 as a result of an international symposium in Trent, Italy, dedicated to “The Future of the Alps.” This meeting functioned both as a vehicle for activating a renewed, broader commitment, and as an expression of this commitment. Two years earlier, the Working Community of the Alpine Regions (ARGE ALP) had been created in Innsbruck, bringing together the federal districts of the Tyrol, Vorarlberg, and Salzburg in Austria; the state of Bavaria in Germany; the canton of Grisons in Switzerland; the autonomous province of Bolzano and the region of Lombardy in Italy. Later the administrations of other regions were added. Regular exchanges on all manner of public affairs were to be carried out via meetings of heads of state and senior officials. To this end the president of the region of Lombardy organized a sizable conference on “The Alps and Europe” in Milan in 1973. And, based on the model of the Working Community, two other communities (ALPS ADRIATIC and COTRAO – the Western-Alps Working Community) were established in 1978 and 1982, respectively.2 The historical context of these activities is the process of European integration and the consequent reconfiguration of nation-state centers and border regions. The movement toward regionalism expressed itself prominently in the Alpine zone, which is crisscrossed by numerous national borders. But the regionalist movement in the Alps also remained somewhat abstract and administrative. What real points of contact could there be between citizens of the Austrian Land of Carinthia and those of The Alps: A Historical Space? 7 the distant Maritime Alps in France? How could a common sense of belonging be sparked at meetings of the presidents of working communities that remained largely unknown? It is true that from the 1970s onward, a number of spontaneous initiatives testified to a heightened sense of Alpine self...