Situation, future scenarios and opportunities

Author: by Massimiliano Rovati

The purpose of this work is not to add further considerations in order to plead a cause that scholars and historians have only recently begun to observe in its importance with a careful eye and scientific objectivity. After years of opposition dictated by a painful geographical and political border line, an ideological frontier 1 that has at times blinded intellectuals on both sides, our desire is fundamentally to describe the general situation of an ethnic, social and cultural reality that is called the Italian minority in Istria. To understand what its current problems are, its projects and its prospects, in the light of the changes in the geopolitical structure of this Central Europe that has always been rich in controversial history, in which, as emerges from Istrian literature, the nightmare of the past - the exodus - seen by those who crossed the border and by those who remained in those lands, still weighs like a millstone on the present. When we talk about minorities, we are generally unfamiliar with the whole complex of codified norms, even at an international level, aimed at protecting them; generalizations and clichés sometimes prevail and risk misleading and distorting opinions and judgments. Yet the existence of national, ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities offers many European states a series of unrenounceable opportunities, undoubtedly harbingers of possible conflicts or enrichment, depending on the role and meaning that one wants to reserve for them.

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