Due to nation-building processes between 19th and 20th centuries, people living in the Alps-Adriatic region, that is, the area around the borders of today’s Italy, Austria and (ex)Yugoslavia, suffered the effects of disintegration and violence. During the Cold War, central authorities and international actors such as the CIA and the NATO militarized the territory and controlled national borders meticulously. A climate of suspicion persisted and transformed the border into a symbolic periphery of confrontation between ‘East’ and ‘West’ blocs. My thesis analyses how border communities challenged this divisive imaginary and disrupted hegemonic narratives of an ideologically segregated Europe. By developing crossborder cooperation initiatives since the late 1950s, local intellectuals, policymakers, tourist operators and other actors devised the idea of ‘Alpe-Adria’ to depict the area as a transnational region where friendship, peace and common development could be cultivated. Using a variety of archival documents on these initiatives, as well as oral testimonies of ‘key witnesses’ of cross-border practices, including both officers and common people, I question the binary vision of a divided continent and challenge the history of Cold War Europe by highlighting the perspectives from borderlands. Through this approach, which zooms into the everyday life of border inhabitants, I connect Cold War and European studies with the flourishing subject of border studies. In particular I adopt the concept of ‘borderscape,’ that is, a border landscape in which non-state actors challenge the state’s hegemonic discourse of security and control, to argue that borders are not only the ultimate expression of state power but also sites of possibilities, where political innovation germinates through the agency of local actors. Far from being subordinated to centres, border communities have influenced national and international networks as much as central authorities. This study of cross-border cooperation in the Alps-Adriatic region thus illuminates the autonomy of borderlanders and stands out as a paradigmatic example to reorient the focus towards the lived experience of the nation-state in borderland contexts.
