Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interethnic spaces
166 Elke Kappus boundaries, and how either of these changes would leave any group identity unaffected. This paper will discuss the relation between networks and boundaries and their influence on community management and on the construction of collective identities in relation to the Italian community in the Northern Adriatic Istrian peninsula, which was divided in 1991 between the Yugoslav successor states of Slovenia and Croatia. I will investigate how the institutional networks of the Italian community were affected by the new political border and discuss the strategies that the representatives of the Istro-ltalian community adopted in their attempt to maintain "stable networks” despite the "changing boundaries". The paper focuses on the political structures and institutional restraints in which the networks of the Istro-ltalian community were and are re-organised. I will stress the necessity to study and analyse collective identities in the overarching political and institutional contexts in which they are embedded and by which they are confined. Changing States In the last Yugoslav census, published in 1991, approximately 18,500 of the Istrian peninsula’s total population of 334,000 declared themselves to be Italians. The Istro-ltalian community was organised in twenty-one local associations, which understood - as did schools and kindergardens and other institutions - the regulations of the culturally largely independent Republics of Slovenia and Croatia. Furthermore, the Istro-ltalian communities, associated in the Unione Italianat at Rijeka/ Fiume, hold a radio station, a TV channel (both in Koper/Capodistria), a theatre (in Rijeka/ Fiume), a publishing house (in Rijeka/ Fiume) and a historical research centre (in Rovinj/ Rovigno). Those common institutions spanned their network across the administrative border between the Slovene and Croatian Republics and shaped the “space” inside the Yugoslav state (Image 1), in which the Istro-ltalians have re-constructed and developed a vivid com-
