1JZGauQ

4: CASE STUDY 1: THE ITALIAN/SLOVENIAN BORDER
ideological or political statements or through building bunkers as part of a
military statement.
Through this study we can see that the post-World War II border between
former Yugoslavia and Italy had a traumatic start and that its beginning
stages had a lot of similarities to what can be described as more ‘recognised
Iron Curtain-style’ borders further north, such as the inner German border.
Photographs, documents and local stories provide a picture of how the new
border was formed and what it looked like. The barbed wire that was first
rolled out along the border accompanied by strict surveillance on both sides
demonstrates the military character this border had at these early stages. In
some places there were even mines (Velušček and Medved 2002). One of the
important results of this study has been the discussions that it has created of
what we consider the Iron Curtain to be, or to have been in the past. The
material and other sources show us a highly complex border that has changed
over time. It was never the purpose of this study to establish if this was or was
not part of the Iron Curtain but rather it was meant to be a starting point for a
discussion of what an Iron Curtain is, or was.
This study has demonstrated that people have very different idea of what
would constitute an Iron Curtain. A few points are similar in many people’s
views though and they suggest an Iron Curtain is: high fences or concrete
walls; presence of barbed wire; a border impossible to penetrate; a dividing
line between capitalist and communist ideologies. This image is very much
based on the image of the Berlin Wall. How people see an Iron Curtain and if
they see the former Yugoslav-Italian border to be part of one or not is highly
dependent on factors such as their own and their family’s relationship with
the border, or where they are from. Many of the people I have spoken to in
Italy claim that people on the Yugoslavian side where much poorer and much
more controlled by the authorities than themselves, something they think of
as Iron Curtain-like features. For many Italians there is just not much of an
interest in looking eastwards, their focus has for such a long time been
towards the rest of Italy and Western Europe. This feeling is generally not
recognised by people from former Yugoslavia who claim to have, at least in
some ways, benefitted from the proximity of the border. You therefore often
find that people in Italy are much more likely to consider this border to have
been part of the former Iron Curtain than people in today’s Slovenia.
The views of what an Iron Curtain is and if the Italian-Yugoslav border
was part of it also changes with time and with changing political climate. In
what is now Slovenia the use of the term Iron Curtain has in more recent
years been connected to politicians for more right wing parties who by
117