The Contested Adriatic Sea: The Adriatic Guard and Identity Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia

Throughout history, Mediterranean cultures have tried to appropriate, with words or weapons, the sea that surrounds them. Sometimes called the “Inner Sea,” “Superior Sea,” or “Great Sea,” the Mediterranean was designated by the Greeks—as the Odyssey testifies—as theirs, “Our Sea.” In the 1920s, Mussolini revived the Latin mare nostrum to justify the “Italian-ness” of the Mediterranean (and, by extension, of the Adriatic Sea and its immediate eastern coastline, Dalmatia), an act that marked a new step in a long-term process that placed the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas at the core of national identity politics. Yugoslav ascriptions of the adjective “Yugoslav,” or even “Slavic,” to the Adriatic Sea during the interwar period proceeded from the same desire: to appropriate a space in order to articulate a national discourse.