The Contested Adriatic Sea: The Adriatic Guard and Identity Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia 1 IGOR TCHOUKARINE T HROUGHOUT 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.” 2 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. 3 This article explores such discourse through the case study of the interwar Yugoslav association Jadranska Straža (the Adriatic Guard), whose name embodies its raison d’être. I examine how, in the association’s monthly journal The Adriatic Guard, Courier of the Adriatic Guard Association [Jadranska Straža, Glasnik udruženja Jadranska Straža] (hereafter Courier) between 1929 and 1933, the Adriatic Sea was mobilized as the spatial, cultural, political, and economic core of what it meant to be Yugoslav, and how this concept of the Adriatic could help the Slavic inhabitants of Yugoslavia to cultivate a collective sense of belonging. 4 1 A draft of this article was presented at the 2009 AAASS convention in Boston. This article represents the beginning of a broader project on the Adriatic Sea as a space of coexistence and conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My thanks to Pieter M. Judson, the Austrian History Yearbook, and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments. Special thanks go as well to Larry Wolff and Pamela Ballinger, who generously agreed to participate in the panel and made helpful suggestions. 2 Predrag Matvejevitch, Bréviaire méditerranéen [published in English as Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape], trans. from the Croatian by Évaine Le Calvé-Ivicevic, (Paris, 1992), 172–73. 3 As Emilio Cocco has mentioned, the Adriatic Sea’s heterogeneity encouraged a multiplicity of experiences, whether cultural, commercial, or political, among the inhabitants of its territory. As a consequence, studies that frame their analyses of identity around the Adriatic are rare. Emilio Cocco, “Introduction: The Adriatic Space of Identity,” Folks Art—Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 1 (2006): 8. 4 This time period begins in 1929 at the start of King Alexander’s dictatorship and the nomination of Ivo Tartaglia (president of the Adriatic Guard from 1929 to 1941) as ban (governor) of the coastal district [Primorska Banovina] Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011): 33–51 © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2011 doi:10.1017/S0067237811000038 33