In one of the last sessions of the Budapest Parliament in the tumultuous weeks that led to the implosion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the autumn of 1918 (imperial proclamation of federal reform of the Austrian portion of the Empire, collapse of the Piave and Salonika fronts, social and national revolts) the representative of Fiume Andrea Ossoinack appealed to the Wilsonian principle of self-determination of peoples for the capital of Carnaro, whose Italian nature had to be recognised and respected.

On 29 October, the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs proclaimed itself, which brought together these components present within the Habsburg imperial structure: no sovereign state recognised it, but Charles I gave it the war fleet moored in Pola and Rijeka, which historically represented one of the objectives of Croatian nationalists.

In this situation, on 30 October 1918 the Italian National Council of Fiume declared the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy and took measures to confront the Croatian component which, supported by units of the dissolved Imperial-Royal Army, intended to absorb the city, the port and the railway into a new national state representing the southern Slavs.

On the website of the Società di Studi Fiumani, the volume edited by the late Danilo Massagrande “The minutes of the Italian National Council of Fiume and the Steering Committee 1918-1920” (Società di Studi Fiumani, Rome 2014) which bears witness to the work carried out in the chaotic post-war period by the native Italian ruling class as a seal on a path that began with autonomism, continued with irredentism and culminated in self-determination:

http://www.webdeveloping.it/studifiumani/verbali.pdf

Lorenzo Salimbeni