This article probes the consequences of basing post-World War I citizenship regimes on the Habsburg imperial network system for the control of mobility, a system known among specialists as Heimatrecht or pertinency. To date most of the historiography has focused on what this meant for national minorities in nationalizing states, with the most important studies thus far looking at the experience of Jews in Austria and Poland. We argue that though the national exclusionary tools of postwar pertinency are of undoubted importance, a larger, social trauma was experienced through post-Habsburg Europe, one that affected far more people and left many facing the consequences of potential statelessness. This article focuses on how postwar pertinency affected the worlds of work, welfare, and expulsion in the immigrant-rich industrial port town of Fiume, Europe's smallest postwar successor state.In November 1918, the Habsburg Monarchy dissolved and about 50 million people found themselves without a state. By early 1919, politicians, lawyers, diplomats, business elites, and activists at the Paris Peace conference were discussing plans for replacing the Habsburg imperial complex with future nation-states. 1 At the heart of these negotiations was a liberal vision of rights-oriented citizenship. No one in Paris wanted Bolshevik councils to serve as the basis for the new states: the dominant dream was to set up parliamentary, capitalist, free-market, secular democracies that would protect individual rights of citizens, hasten prosperity, and forestall ethnic violence. 2 When the first treaties creating the post-Habsburg successor states were signed, they outlined how citizenship in
After the demise of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Fiume's long political transition provided women with new challenges and opportunities. This was especially true for female public employees who had to adapt to a weak and fluid state that provided them with social security and benefits in exchange for loyalty and control. Beginning with two case studies of women elected to the Fiume city council in 1919, this paper explores how the two professional cohorts they represented – teachers and tobacco workers – learned to cope with the turbulent national and political events, as well as with the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.
The First World War unsettled not just the geopolitical arrangement of a large part of Europe, but also previously held gender roles and family relations. With the conflict's end, the bordering cities of Fiume and Susak went through a long transition characterised by administrative instability and economic uncertainty, as well as by political and national tensions, before being integrated into the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, respectively. Drawing on available sources in both Italian and Croatian, this article analyses the case study of a border area in order to investigate women's presence in the public sphere, considering both their political participation - to the extent this was allowed by the different forms of suffrage - and their associationism within political and philanthropic organisations. Moreover, in order to trace the reactions triggered by women's activism, the article examines gender representations in the local press, which was mostly linked to the main conflicting political factions and dominated by male journalists.
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