Barcelona, Naples and Salonika: Ethnic and Civic Nationalism in Three Mediterranean Port Cities (1888–1915) ^†

Abstract

How far is port cities’ cosmopolitan inclination reflected in the type of nationalism prevailing in the surrounding area or region? How do these relationships change in different timeframes, one determined by nationalist modernization, the other by neoliberal globalization? This article attempts to respond to this question by looking at three Northern Mediterranean port cities (Barcelona, Naples, and Salonica) in two different time settings: the advent of the centralizing nation-state preceding WW1 and the advent of free-market deregulation policies adopted worldwide since the 1980s. It does so by adapting a new critical reading of Hans Kohn’s dichotomy on civic/ethnic nationalism—and extending it to the realm of culture in an age of deep global transformations.

1. Introduction

While studying the variation in the formation of nations in the post-war, the comparative historian Hans Kohn (1891–1971) argued that Western nations (chiefly the US, England, and France) formed by coalescing around pre-existing state institutions, in which membership into the nation was equated with citizenship (Kohn 1944).1 He contrasted this model with Eastern nationalism, in which state-seeking national movements (chiefly, the nations emerging from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires) preceded state formation and thus focused more on descent, blood, and lineage than on identification with existing institutions. They also focused on shared culture as articulated using a common vernacular language. Yet, despite the similar centrality of language and similar language policies, Kohn believed that ‘membership’ in the Western nation was determined more by voluntary action rather than by common culture or shared ethnic descent. Politically, the distinction was one between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ forms of identity formation. Geographically, such distinction corresponded to a division between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ zones of nationalism.

Hans Kohn’s framework has been criticized from a variety of perspectives (Brubaker 1999; Bugge 2022; Coakley 2018; Kuzio 2002; Liebich 2006; Martigny 2008; Özkırımlı 2000, pp. 35–37; Roshwald 2020; Yack 1996). Anthony D. Smith has identified Hans Kohn’s dichotomy as belonging to a set of “moralistic” oppositions between “good” and “bad” nationalism (Smith 1998). Critics argue against Hans Kohn’s ahistorical approach, pointing out that it belonged to a long tradition of nationalism studies scholars who contributed to an ideological justification for capitalist advancement and the defense of bourgeois interests (Conversi 2010b).

However, is there a possibility to ‘ground’ and contextualize the East–West dichotomy in specific territories and civic traditions that can reveal the contours of its epistemological validity? In this article, I argue that this can be achieved by looking at strategically positioned loci, namely cities that have wide access to commercial routes and have historically experienced various levels of interconnectedness with the rest of the world. It is here, I argue, that various types of nationalism encounter their raw material where they can both shape and adapt to peculiar conditions that can delineate the contours of a possible rootedness of the Kohnian typology beside its deterministic overtones and in specific time-limited chronological settings. The article looks at three port cities, all located in the Northern Mediterranean.

The comparative study of port cities reveals, however, that such oppositions conceal a much more complex reality. All nationalisms have civic and ethnic components, and the stress on each of them depends on shifting social, cultural, and political circumstances. This paper contrasts three port cities against the backdrop of their respective regions’ nationalizing trends and state-building processes, considering how varying levels of opposition amongst these forces interacted with local politics: Barcelona, Naples (Napoli), and Salonika (Thessalonica). All three port cities have been deeply affected and changed by the advent of nationalism. However, the contexts in which they found themselves entangled were manifested in sharply different nationalizing forms. Indeed, one can argue that the forms of nationalism experienced by the three port cities constituted three extreme points in a continuum along the East–West geo-spatial order. Although the article dismisses the simplifications associated with Kohn’s dichotomy, it agrees that there is a sharp, nearly irreconcilable distinction between patterns developed in the three geographical areas and their hinterlands. It concludes by questioning whether the very quality and position of port cities can allow a privileged viewpoint from which to assess claims about distinctive models of nationalism. For all three cities, 1888 is considered the starting point: in this year, Barcelona’s Universal Exposition, Napoli’s Risanamento (f. Società pel Risanamento di Napoli), and Salonika’s urban developments and railway connection with Central Europe, heralded a phase of rapid industrialization that created the ripe conditions for different types of conflict to emerge later—while various other economic niches became marginalized in the process. According to the OED, the English world urbanization also first appeared in print in 1888, shortly after the verb ‘to industrialize’ (Mugglestone 2006, p. clxvii).2 These words served to describe new phenomena that changed the way people lived and perceived reality (van Ostade 2009, p. 53). Industrialization was the main vector of these changes, although with uneven spread and results.

However, these broader conflict-ridden developmental conditions did not always result in expanding class mobilization. As we shall see, the class consciousness derived from industrialization yielded very different results in each region, and this difference was often, although not necessarily, related to the way nationalism manifested itself in the three regions. In Barcelona, class consciousness emerged in the interstice between two contrasting nationalisms, one imposed by the central state, the other reflecting a popular and widespread opposition to the central state (Conversi 1997; McRoberts 2001). In the city of Naples, both the rooting of the central state and class consciousness were made difficult by the illegitimacy resulting from the central state’s repressive policies and in the absence of a political regionalist movement (Giannatiempo 2022; Hobsbawm 1971). Finally, an important working class movement emerged in Salonica after 1908, largely led by Jewish and Bulgarian activists (Mazower 2005, pp. 285–90), but the extreme violence of the Balkan wars and the subsequent rising of homogenizing nationalism silenced all forms of distinctive opposition. In these conditions, nationalism became the exclusive interpretive and orientating grid through which social and political life could be articulated and organised.

2. Barcelona: Civic Values and Self-Declared Civic Nationalism

Barcelona’s heralded position as the capital of a territory characterized by early industrialization and dense flows of commercial interactions implied a specific relationship with its territory and culture, often encapsulated in a series of mythical constructs of Catalonia as a terra de pas. Since at least the 1888 Universal Exposition, Barcelona has tried to secure a hegemonic position within Spain (Jacobson 2011).

Local historians, like Jaume Vicens Vives (1910–1960), elaborated on this pluralist conception. Vives used the concept of passadís (passageway, corridor, passage):

“The peoples who inhabit these passageways are subjected to considerable human pressures, some peaceful, other bellicose and warlike. The play of both trends continually aroused by the ebb and flow of historical events, engenders a permanent vital tension and develops particular qualities… A passageway people finds always itself in dangerous historical situations, so that powerful currents of resistance rise up in the spirit of the people, creating and recreating it over the centuries”.

(Vicens Vives 1954, p. 20)

Social theory has developed an idea of the peculiar integrative and accommodating capacity of seaborne societies. In particular, the Catalan case seems to fit Gerhard Lenski’s definition of a maritime society, one of whose characteristics is its greater ‘openness’ in comparison with other types of societies, including industrial societies (Lenski 1966). Their reliance on the free movement of goods and labor endows maritime societies with peculiar integrative traits towards out-groups.

Several Catalan authors in other fields, like the philosopher Josep Ferrater Mora (1912–1991), the economist Carles Pi-Sunyer (1888–1971), and the sociologist/demographer Joaquim Maluquer i Sostres (1930–2011), have described Catalonia’s historical capacities of assimilation: its position along the Mediterranean coast, between two large countries, France and Spain (both champions, till the recent past, of an intolerant and chauvinist vision of ethnic relations), the constant flux of different peoples, the cosmopolitan nature of Barcelona, of its port and its commercial activities (Ferrater Mora 1981; Maluquer i Sostres 1963, 1965; Pi Sunyer 1927). Catalonia is thus often characterized as a terra de pas, that is, a country of passage, a thoroughfare, an interstitial passageway linking the Peninsula to the rest of Europe. One can read here implicit notions of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and métissage.

Historically, Catalonia’s geographic position has turned it into a receiving ground for multiple cultural influences and movements of people. Demographically, the coastal area’s openness to commerce through the port of Barcelona pushed population growth to a much faster rate than in most of the interior—both birth rate and immigration were higher in Barcelona. In Catalonia, most immigrants came from neighboring and culturally similar regions, often from nearby Occitania (Southern France), and hence they had no particular difficulties in assimilating.3 This may help to explain why Catalonia’s integrative traditions are often treated as a primordial given. The past success in integrating Southern French elements provided a stimulus for future optimism.4

For Joan Ramon Resina, Barcelona’s ‘coming of age’ and ‘vocation of modernity’ begins with the 1888 Universal Exposition, as the Catalan language established an inextricable link between the city’s modernity and its literature (Resina 2008; See also Jacobson 2011). This seems an ideal point of departure as parallel infrastructural developments were taking place in Ottoman Salonika and, to a lesser extent, in Naples.

The population continued to expand into the nineteenth century. Constant industrial growth led to the formation of manufacturing centers and the enlargement of Barcelona. During these years, Catalan nationalism was seemingly able to articulate an alternative vision of civic society in which culture and other values worked as a glue and instrument of social cohesion (Conversi 1997). However, as Ucelay De Cal has shown, it would be unrealistic to idealize Catalan socio-political developments: Despite Spain’s neutrality during the Great War, fascism soon began to exert its powerful influence throughout Spain, and Catalonia proved to be no exception. Charles Maurras’ route to “French fascism” found a passionate advocate and admirer in Eugenio d’Ors (1882–1954) (Ucelay da Cal 2002, p. 7). For d’Ors, the model was to be found in classical Greece and the Roman Empire through Barcelona’s cultural orientation towards the Mediterranean basin (Fuentes Codera 2012; González and Carlos 1998).5 Glorifying city and empire, d’Ors reinterpreted the medieval reign of Jaume I ‘el Conqueridor’ (James I the Conqueror, 1208–1276) as an imperial age, more than in nationalist or regionalist terms. Such a ‘civilizing mission’ was identified as the imperial stage of classicism and could be read as a Catalan proposal for the regeneration of Spain (Ucelay da Cal 2003).6 That is, the aim was to build a new Spain from the expansion of the Catalan cultural, historical, and political values and traditions, rooted in turn in the classical Mediterranean tradition rather than in the arid and isolated Castilian meseta. In contrast with the rest of Spain, Catalan nationalists, even the most conservative and bourgeois of them, never favored the expansion of state power but “insisted on the importance of civil society as the defining component in any political balance” (Ucelay da Cal 2002, p. 7). Thus, stress on civic values became the fulcrum around which a self-declared civic nationalism could coalesce—to be put to the test several decades later (Conversi 1997; Conversi and Jeram 2017).

3. Naples: From Capital City to Cultural Capital

Naples showed a more complex pattern of muted resistance to Italian nationalism during a period of otherwise fervent nationalization culminating with the war on Libya (1911–1912) and Italy’s entrance into WW1. 1915. In contrast with the other two cities, the industry underwent a phase of slow decline after Italian unification until the cessation of several productive activities in the 1880s (Bevilacqua 2005). Like other Southern cities, Naples’ resistance to Italian ‘nation-building’ was characterized by a ‘mistrust of the state and a habit of taking justice into one’s own hands’ (Lupo 2009, p. 11). This impeded the articulation of a regionally based political movement, yet resistance could be expressed in a host of pre-political forms, particularly via cultural defiance. What characterizes Naples in respect of other Southern cities is the submerged presence of a latent Neapolitan patriotism that has been unable to find a political expression. Militarily, Italy was first unified by the mythical Expedition of the Thousand (Spedizione dei Mille) formally led by General Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860, but de facto directed by Camillo Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, a kingdom which covered the previous dynastic conquests and possessions of the House of Savoy, originally located in today’s France. In practice, the expedition’s goal was the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the so-called ‘Kingdom of Sardinia’, which was actually the Kingdom of Piedmont in disguise. The ‘annexations’ were far from being hailed vox populi. Numerous forms and activities of local resistance developed in response, some open, like the brigantaggio (brigandage, banditry), others subtler, and still others so concealed that they seemed to display an unconditional acceptance of the new order. Such was the feeling masterfully expressed by Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa (1896–1957), in his autobiographical novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) with his famous sentence: ‘Things must change so that all can remain the same’ (Di Lampedusa 1988). This attitude runs deeper than the trasformismo (approx. ‘chameleonism’), pervading Italian politics at least since unification. From a political science viewpoint, the post-unification practice of trasformismo led to the ‘endemic fragility’ of a system of alliances and personal agreements, through which a “powerful center coalition permanently holds power and blocks the opposition from becoming a possible alternative government”, so that the political and industrial elite uses “the government as organizational tools of its hegemony” (Revelli 2013).7 Interestingly, Nico Perrone ascribes the very invention of trasformismo to the annexation of Naples and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, when the maverick politician Liborio Romano (1793–1867) simultaneously (or subsequently) was able to maintain high ranking posts in the secret carboneria, the Piedmontese elite, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (as Prefect of Police and, then, Minister of the Interior), while cultivating links with the camorra organized crime syndicate, to which he delegated the task of guaranteeing ‘security’ after Garibaldi’s accession to Naples (Perrone 2009).8 According to a loyalist testimony, “after the Plebiscite, the violence of Camorra and Garibaldi knew no restraints: honest and peaceful citizens were no longer safe, nor were their possessions, their life, or social order as a whole […]. The Camorristi, now bosses of everything, could travel free on state railways, bringing with them corruption and terror into neighbouring villages” (cited by Di Fiore 2007).9 The state’s use of outlaws for security tasks during early phases of state-building and formation has been illustrated in other centralizing societies, like Turkey (Üngör 2012).

If we venture outside Naples, the response to ruthless state repression was flabbergasting: some groups and areas rose up in arms, only to be annihilated. Official historians have treated the spread of brigantaggio as a nasty episode of criminality and insubordination—at most, as a semi-spontaneous reaction to the model of France’s Vendée (1793–1796) (see Fiorillo and Romanelli 1992). In these conditions, brigandage expressed, absorbed, and manifested both local resistance and a “primitive” form of class, consciousness, or at least disorganized elements of class mobilization (Hobsbawm 1971). Southern brigands, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, “saw themselves as the people’s champions against the gentry and the ‘foreigners’”, approaching the description of a “mass revolution and war of liberation led by social bandits” (Hobsbawm 1971, p. 21). Hobsbawm cites Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’) (Levi 2006) to describe how “the ‘years of the brigands’ are among the few parts of history which are alive and real” among the Southern peasants because the bandit-heroes “belong to them… (as) champions of the people…longing for liberty and justice” (Hobsbawm 1971, p. 21).

According to Salvatore Lupo, during and after unification, Neapolitan ‘patriotism’ remained a powerful force, which Piedmont’s élites were unable to completely subdue. The Risorgimento has thus resulted in a gruesome ‘civil war’ characterized by a clash between three distinct ‘patriotisms’: the Italian, the Neapolitan, and the Sicilian, in which the latter joined Garibaldi’s forces largely out of their anti-Neapolitan predisposition (Lupo 2011). However, resistance was fragmented, and institution-building in the name of Neapolitan patriotism never took place, nor could it establish strong links with the surrounding countryside. For instance, the brigands were partly outlaws and partly guerrilla, mixing scoundrelry and Neapolitan patriotism in a plot difficult to disentangle (Lupo 2011). At the same time, a subterranean alliance took place between organized crime (chiefly, the camorra secret society or crime syndicate) and Italian unification nationalism to suppress Neapolitan patriotism (Perrone 2009). While this yielded bitter results in terms of building civic nationalism, either Italian or Neapolitan, it did not lead to the creation of an opposite form of exclusivist ethnic nationalism either. In other words, Kohn’s “western” type of nationalism merged with a fragmented society where national consciousness was hardly possible or, at least, highly disjointed and often polarized.

In Naples itself, the heavy intervention of the central state reflected a similar situation in which outlaws prospered in a political legitimacy vacuum. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the post-unitary Piedmontese-led urban regeneration scheme called Risanamento (approx. health reclamation, cleansing, and recovery) culminated in 1888 with the creation of the Società pel Risanamento di Napoli (Naples Rehabilitation Society), allegedly to eliminate urban ‘degradation’, identified as a major cause of cholera and other diseases. The Risanamento enriched those working in the construction business but set in motion massive human displacement and impoverishment, a paradoxical deterioration of health conditions amongst the laborers, an increase in crime and imprisonment rates, and a formidable expansion in the profession of prostitution.10 The Risanamento illustrates what James C. Scott described as the blending of ‘high modernist’ statecraft with urban grid-making and the taming of the demos with projects of failed legibility and simplification (Scott 1998). All of these point to a strong, authoritarian, ruthless, and violent form of state-building (Giannatiempo 2022) that failed to peacefully yield a shared national consciousness.

4. Salonika: Europe’s Lost Cultural Legacy

As a major port in the Ottoman Levant, Salonika’s history shows how the spread of rival nationalisms and the erasure of one of the richest plurinational contexts in the Mediterranean followed incipient industrialization. Paradoxically, the apex of the city’s modernization was reached as late Ottoman rulers engaged in building new infrastructure: the year 1888 saw a host of spectacular urban developments, including the establishment of an international railway connection with Central Europe, the first urban tram service network and various modern public buildings, just while the ancient city walls were being torn down. Railroad links to Skopje and Istanbul encouraged investors in Salonika to construct textile industries and tobacco processing factories, turning the city by 1900 into “the largest industrial workforce in the empire” and “ one of the most important centers of manufacturing and banking in the Ottoman Empire” (Masters 2009, p. 504). The late Ottoman modernizing drive aspired to highlight the city’s (and its Ottoman administrators’) European identity.

Like Barcelona, Salonika could thus vaunt a ‘cosmopolitan’ past (Vassilikou 2002), although only nationalists would venture to say that this is still the case today. As a Balkan port city, Salonika had a highly variegated and ethnically mixed population. In 1613, during the apogee of Ottoman rule, Sephardic Jews, mostly traders and merchants, represented 68% of the city’s population and were articulated via twenty-five congregations (Israel 2002, p. 86; Veinstein 1992, pp. 42–45). So important was Jewish identity and influence that the activity of the port ground came to a halt during the Shabbat festivity.

Besides Jewish, Turkish, and Greek communities, many other minorities lived and worked side by side in Salonika and its port area: Bulgarians, Vlachs, Serbs, Albanians, Dönme, Macedonians, Armenians, Roma and other ethnic groups, plus several religious orders and sects, like the Sabbateans and various Sufi and Kabbalist orders—of whose legacy the casual tourist could find no trace whatsoever by visiting Thessaloniki today. The Jewish presence was particularly central to the civic essence of the port city because ‘the more general rabbinic principle of dina de-malkhuta dina “the law of the land is law”…(as) primary traditional formula for the civic posture of all diaspora Jewries… (provided) a guarantee of an absolute communal quiescence’ (Levene 2003).

Mazower (2005) has identified Salonika as a paradigmatic example of a multi-ethnic city radically destroyed by policies of cultural and ethnic homogenization. While this fate was shared by many European cities (Conversi 2007, 2008), the most affected and most victimized were those cities situated in disputed territories or, worse, whose population had disputable loyalties. Throughout Europe, ’urbicide’ affected paradoxically those cities that, because of their multi-ethnic background, clashed frontally with nationalist aspirations for ethnic and cultural homogeneity (Campbell et al. 2007; Coward 2009). However, the very term urbicide can conceal a much more tragic reality since most massacres occurred in the surrounding countryside, away from public gaze.

Multicultural existence was abruptly and irreversibly terminated once nationalism, particularly Greek and Turkish nationalism, took hold and began to dismantle the multi-ethnic fabric of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. The city lay at the crossroads between competing militarizing forces, like the Bulgarian IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), the Greek Macedonian Committee, other Greek guerrillas, and, since 1908, the Young Turks, which spread throughout Turkey originating from Salonika (Levene 2014b, pp. 118–21; Üngör 2011). Each movement was strictly based on an ethnically exclusivist and xenophobic political agenda, despite some of them initially trying to attract minorities via their ‘secular’ orientation (Levene 2002, 2003; Mazower 2005). Mutual exclusiveness was all-encompassing: as Greek nationalists were pressured toward Hellenization after 1912, Turkish authorities shifted from tolerance to parallel policies of Turkification—both mimicking previous trends imported from the ‘core’ Western countries, notably Germany and France (Conversi 2007, 2008; Mandelbaum 2014). In its most extreme form, Turkification could only materialize later and under the cover of the First World War (Winter 1989, 2003) and the rise of the Young Turks’ genocidal policies (Akçam 2006, 2012, 2013). During this phase of Turkish history, pressure towards homogenization became increasingly relentless, terminating with the assimilation of several minorities, including the Dönme or Sabbateans of Jewish descent (Baer 2004; Neyzi 2002; Stavroulakis 1993).11

Specific studies have dealt with the erasure of Salonika’s Jewish heritage and its radical demographic and political changes (Lewkowicz 2006).12 In his milestone book on genocide, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, Benjamin Lieberman begins his travels through Europe’s genocidal past with a chapter called ‘Farewell to Salonica’ and concludes it with a gloomy chapter entitled ‘After the Ottomans’ (Lieberman 2006).

According to Goebel and Keene, the Greek conquest of Salonika “and the subsequent Muslim exodus marked the beginning of the break-up of the multi-religious city that was completed with the deportation of the city’s Jewry during the Nazi occupation. Within the space of a generation, a city composed of Jews, Muslims, and Greeks (in this order) became an almost completely Greek settlement” (Goebel and Keene 2011, p. 18). There is, thus, a continuity and discursive unity between the ethnic cleansing of Balkan Muslims and the Holocaust. The ongoing debate is whether there was extensive Greek collaboration in the Holocaust (Levene 2014a, chp. 3; Mazower 2005, chp. 22) or collaborationism was weak due to the rise of anti-Nazi resistance (Apostolou 2000; Benbassa and Rodrigue 1995, pp. 171–72; Mazower 2000).

However, this still underestimates the magnitude of the city’s ethnic cleansing: In Thrace, one can begin to identify an official policy of population transfers as early as 1913, when even Ottoman officials began to conceive forced migration as “a problem of alien minorities”, in sharp contrast with the more inclusive, civic and tolerant discourse and practice of Ottoman rulers before the Balkan wars (Ginio 2013, pp. 283–84).13 After the Young Turks seized power, this strategy was transformed into a wholesale policy of destruction, devastation, and homogenization (Akçam 2013), which, once Ottomans were no longer in control of Salonika and its environs, led not only to the Armenian genocide (Winter 2003) but to the mass extermination of various minorities, such as the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, and the Syrian Christians (Gaunt 2013), as well as Greeks, Arabs, dissident Turks and Kurds (Jones 2016, pp. 115–17), and, later on, Islamic Sufi orders, in a series of unprecedented atrocities which have been collectively described as ‘late Ottoman genocide’ (Schaller and Zimmerer 2009). ‘Cultural cleansing’ of the very Turkish heritage eventually reached a peak of forced ethno-cultural homogeneity during the age of Atatürk’s Reforms (1926–1934).

It is, however, necessary to consider that the adjective ‘Ottoman’ cannot be easily coupled with the substantive ‘genocide’, since, by that time, the Sultan’s system of governance was deeply permeated by nationalism’s triumph. As the latter’s influence on state affairs could no longer be ignored, the Sublime Porte’s policies had begun to swing heavily towards ethnicization and mono-culturalism.

While Muslims were killed and expelled en masse by victorious nationalist armies and mobs throughout the Balkans and parts of Russia, a gigantic exodus took place. Of the millions displaced, at least 240,000 fled through Salonika alone, while “each of the military commands of the Balkan allies strove to cleanse their zones of ‘Turks’ even if it meant dumping expellees in the zones of their fraternal neighbors” (Levene 2014b, p. 102).

If the situation was tragic in Salonika, it was even worse in the rural areas, just outside the city: for instance, “the Greek defeat of the Bulgarian army in Thrace was rapidly followed by the systematic Greek devastation of every Bulgarian village around Kukuch to a distance of about one hundred miles” (Levene 2014b, p. 103). Peasants made up the vast majority of the persecuted, maimed, expelled, and killed. Thus, the columns of refugees included unprecedented numbers of “peasants leaving their homes with whatever possessions they could carry” (Lieberman 2003, p. 113). At the same time, during the Second Balkan War (1913), Greek authorities and military engaged in a targeted hunt for Bulgarians, erasing entire villages from the map and massacring Bulgarian civilians (Brown 2013).

Both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide are linked with Salonika’s history: The city was not only the starting point of the most extreme factions of the Young Turks movement, the chief genocide perpetrators (Akçam 2012, 2013; Schaller and Zimmerer 2009; Suny et al. 2011; Üngör 2011) but also had a thriving Jewish community, which made up almost two-thirds of the city’s population. Before the Second Balkan War and WW1, Greeks had always been a minority. Most of them would arguably not self-identify as Greeks or were anyhow aware of their Greekness (Karakasidou 1997, pp. 43–65).

After 1905, Salonika became the center of Young Turks, a group of military officers articulated around the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti).14 The CUP leaders were largely drawn from Salonika, and “practically every one of them, born there or not, had some political or social connection with the now Greek-annexed port city” (Levene 2014b, p. 112). Turkey’s most prominent dictator, Mustafa Kemal (alas Atatürk), was born in Salonika in 1881 when the city was still called Selânik.15

A devastating fire occurred in 1917 as the city was under military occupation by nearly 100,000 French and British troops (Guinn 1965, pp. 131–32). The fire destroyed two-thirds of the city, mostly the Turkish and Jewish neighborhoods, including over 40 synagogues, but most Greek areas were spared by the fire. The government refused to rebuild the city as it was and commissioned a French architect with a radical urban plan and no connection with Salonika’s past. This form of urbicide was directly connected with the purely ethnic shape that the Greek state, like other nationalizing states in that era, notably Turkey, was rapidly taking.

From this ethnically cleansed city, therefore, a new, more radical, fanatic, and extremist group of nationalists moved Eastwards to export the Western-born doctrine of national homogeneity, which became a forceful attempt to craft cultural ‘congruency’ between nation and state where none existed (Mandelbaum 2016, 2020): within few years, it seized the opportunity of silence offered by WW1 to accomplish the Armenian genocide (Winter 2003), which many identify as the first genocide of the modern age (Balakian 2003; Bloxham 2005, p. 14; Carmichael 2009; Mann 2005; Schaller and Zimmerer 2009; De Zayas 2003) and the ‘precursor to the Holocaust’ (MacDonald 2007, p. 129).16 These massacres and genocides occurred in territories where minorities and majorities had peacefully coexisted for centuries.17 Often, local political elites worked at the behest of Western powers, particularly France and Great Britain, where there was awareness of the fate of Balkan minorities. According to the International Commission established by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “the object of these armed conflicts, overt or covert. was the complete extermination of an alien population” (cited by Lieberman 2003, p. 113). In fact, foreign powers and international state elites had already fixed in their mind an ‘ethnic’ map of a Europe made up of homogeneous entities. These maps did not fit local reality. On the contrary, local populations were forced to adjust to them. In other words, ethnic nationalism was not the inevitable consequence of ancient hatreds and primordial identities, as claimed by nationalist propaganda. Rather, the impossibility of a genuine civic nationalism was dictated and encouraged by most Western powers and thus shared by nearly all Balkan nationalisms as both an opportunity and a consequence of force majeure. Kohn’s unbending distinction between East and West fails entirely to mention the vested interests of Western powers to keep the East ‘East’ and, in particular, their incessant and unremitting effort to ‘Balkanize the Balkans’.

The next section draws some conclusions from associating the different trajectories of these three port cities.

5. Comparing Three Port Cities with Different Legacies and Civic Traditions

Port cities have been compared using different lenses. Some scholars have focused on their demographic regimes in terms of mortality, nuptiality, fertility, and degree of interconnectedness, noting their specific risks in terms of epidemics and relatively high birth rates (Lawton and Lee 2002). As focal points of interchange with both the hinterlands and other port cities, changing demographic conditions in port cities were immediately and unilaterally reflected in their hinterlands’ demographic developments as transmitters of pandemics (Lawton and Lee 2002).

Aside from this, the three circumstances inspired three largely distinct literatures. The literature on Napoli is usually consistently critical of the way the city has been administered. Poets, bards, songwriters, film directors, and singers created an ideal city of vital people bursting with vitality, creativity, and good humor in the backdrop of an idyllic scenario (Conversi 2018; Plastino 2007). Even its poetry and songs, which once sang and exalted with enchanting words the city‘s celebrated beauty, have turned into a form of social critique.18

Of the three cities, Napoli is where nationalism was less prevalent in terms of state or regional nationalism, as sub-state regionalist movements never materialized in political terms—let alone nationalist movements.

The case of Salonika is by far the gloomiest one: nationalist historians have dedicated their efforts to exalt the city’s ‘undisputed’ Greekness, that is, to erase its non-Greek past.19 On the other hand, a new thriving literature has appeared in recent years on the way the city’s past has been annihilated and radically re-invented, underlining how the city’s contemporary demography and culture barely reflects continuity with the past (Cohen 2014; Levene 2002, 2003; Lewkowicz 2006; Lieberman 2006; Mazower 2005; Naar 2011; Stavroulakis 1993). Mark Levene expresses well Salonika’s predicament on the eve of WW1: ‘The new states of the region were not “national” in the western civic sense of the word but entities geared against the grain of their actual ethno-religious plurality, towards the supremacy of a single ethnic group. Ensuring the superiority of that group’s “national assets”—to use the language of the time—meant manipulating, if necessary, its demographic preponderance over others (Levene 2003). Nation-building similarly assumes an ethnically homogenizing society, even if this involves forcibly assimilating or expelling members of different groups (Conversi 2008, 2010a). “Additionally, again, developing a national economy entailed favouring that single group in terms of jobs and contracts to the exclusion of others” (Levene 2003).

Contrary to the two other cities, the literature on Barcelona is less critical.20 Critical readings on the ciutat comtal have tended to remain at the margins of mainstream narratives and are unlikely to produce robust anti-modernist critiques in the style of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961). One of Jacobs’ core principles was that the city should reflect, respect, and promote ethnic and cultural diversity, rejecting the enduring myth of social cohesion as a primary value (Jacobs 1961, pp. 135–42). Under the term ‘renewal’ (in Catalan: renovació urbana), practices of urban disembowelment and demolition have often been carried out. For instance, the fate of the Raval borough, which in the post-transition years became a focus of both desired and undesired urban renovation, has been well described by the anthropologist Gary McDonogh, who cautioned that “orthodoxy in city planning must be nuanced both by critical readings and by appreciation of alternative values in urban life” (McDonogh 1991). However, this point may well appear as a more general Spanish problem: In contrast with most other European cities, Spain’s (and Portugal’s) historical centers have been neglected, and the lack of interest of the middle and upper classes for the centers has meant that, in contrast with most European cities, Spain’s upper and middle classes rarely gravitated around the city’s center. Indeed, still today, the politically incorrect term Casco Viejo is preferred over the more European ‘historical center’ (Sp., centro histórico); this is also because the city’s economic core does not overlap with its geo-historical epicenter.21 This means that, despite urban renewal, the tendency of the upper and middle classes has been to steer out of the historical centers, often contributing to their devaluation and decay. On the other hand, this peculiar Spanish trend has sometimes avoided the “gentrification” process of many historical city centers.

Of the three port cities, Barcelona seems to offer the success story, the model to be universally admired, emulated, and lyrically celebrated. Everything about Barcelona seems to be a superb achievement: To Robert Hughes, Barcelona is the Great Enchantress (Hughes 2004). For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Barcelona “has always competed against the odds”, becoming the biggest metropolis on the Mediterranean seaboard (Fernández-Armesto 1992). Even the literature on Red Barcelona’s anarchism and leftism describes the city as a leading revolutionary hub (Smith 2002).22 A kind of synchrony seems to have been established between the enthusiastic tourists visiting Barcelona’s seductive attractions and nationalist historians celebrating Barcelona’s deeds as the proud capital of the modern Catalan nation. It is hard to imagine a book like Mazower’s Salonica ever to be written about Barcelona, even though the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath led to many massacres in the city. We should contrast this with the outpouring of research on mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing accompanying the eruption of nationalism during and after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

In short, Barcelona’s modernizing trends and civic position seem to be exempt from criticism. For instance, in most books on Barcelona, including tourist guides, there is barely a critique of Ildefons Cerdà’s grid-based urban planning, the Pla Cerdà, which led to the building of the Eixample (expansion). Although the design was arguably innovative, it was perceptibly inspired by Baron Haussmann’s (1853–1870) plan for the renovation of Paris under the orders of Napoléon III. While Haussmann had devised a ‘truly French’ product, he could hardly fathom how his model was to be easily adopted and enthusiastically ruthlessly embraced by state bureaucrats, imperial administrators, and urban planners the world over. Similar developments were occurring simultaneously in many European cities, from Ankara to Budapest and Madrid.

In Salonika, urban renewal was seized as an opportunity to eradicate the city’s multicultural past, including the demolition of the Jewish cemetery and several minarets.23 Thus, Greek urban renewal assumed an unmistakably ethnic tinge.

In Barcelona, much of those years’ urban development aimed at building a sort of ‘Paris on the sea’, that could definitively rival Madrid. However, Madrid itself had been subjected to ill-conceived Haussmannian urban planning and re-design. This was at the root of much of Spain’s disastrous over-construction ordeal, which in the 2010s became one of the key factors behind the economic crisis (Korcheck 2015; Pérez 2010).24

Like other Iberian cities at the end of the nineteenth century, including Lisbon, Barcelona’s planning theory and practice echoed French urbanism and was part of an “international ideological movement characterized by hygienist concerns, park creation, and early attempts at regulation” (Camarinhas 2011, p. 11), a prelude to the subsequent obsession with functionalist order, monumentalism and militarized regulation typical of totalitarianism. This totalitarian phase reached Barcelona relatively early with Leon Jaussely’s 1903 plan, which, for the first time in European town planning, introduced rationalization, Taylorization, and zoning themes (Capell 1992). James Scott describes Paris’ grandiose public works under Louis Napoleon (1853–1869) as having “absorbed unprecedented amounts of public debt, uprooted tens of thousands of people” with the overarching aim of “simplification, legibility, straight lines, central management, and a synoptic grasp of the ensemble” (Scott 1998, p. 59).

Whether, why, and how far these urban developments should be seen ‘innovative’ is not frequently questioned: Eulogistic accounts often fail to mention the consequences of the Pla Cerdà, with its tearing down of the old city walls and the destruction of vernacular housing and neighborhoods. Moreover, Barcelona’s Pla Cerdà was conceived before the mass introduction of the automobile, whose increasing usage transformed many city streets into scenes of virtual “slaughter”, with fatality rates rapidly spinning out of control and doubling in respect to other city boroughs.

6. Reconsidering Kohn’s Distinction

This part explores three ways in which citizenship can be articulated via the civic/ethnic, Western/Eastern axis.

Whereas Barcelona’s conflicting relationship with the Spanish state has led to the self-organization of a robust civil society, in which nationalism has often acted as a catalyst, the situation of the other two cities is very different.25 Naples as a port city does not fit easily within the ethnic/civic dichotomy: the vacuum left by Italian unification and the destruction of the Kingdom of Naples has meant not only the subjugation to the Piedmontese bureaucratic-militarist vision, but also the overall estrangement of Neapolitan citizens and civil society from the national project. Various other social, cultural, and anti-state resistance organizations have filled this legitimacy vacuum, among them the Camorra.

Traditionally, the Catholic Church has long acted as a major vessel of shared values in Naples, as elsewhere in the South—despite the permanence of pre-Christian practices, rituals, symbols, values, and myths (De Martino 1973, 2005; De Simone and Rossi 1977). Naples has nevertheless remained a cultural stronghold characterized by one of the most creative cultural scenes in contemporary Italy. At least since the late 1880s, the Neapolitan song genre (canzone napoletana) has ascended to internationally acclaimed recognition, carried abroad by both waves of emigrants and international performers like Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), the first to perform in New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903—in actual performances, the canzone has since merged with opera, becoming itself a classical, yet popularly rooted, genre (Conversi 2016, 2018). The Neapolitan song has also provided a symbol of resistance to the shallow cultural homogenization envisioned by zealous bureaucrats, providing a fresh output of spontaneous vitality and creativity and becoming a prime channel for expressing vernacular sentiments—particularly when these could not be politically expressed (Conversi 2018). Theatre production has also blossomed, with the Royal Theatre of Saint Charles (Real Teatro di San Carlo) continuing performances since its establishment in 1737 under the sponsorship of King Charles VII.

Finally, Barcelona’s integrative traditions, however often exaggerated by the influence of nationalist historians (Ucelay da Cal 2002), could shed light on the alternative routes to construct a civic nationalism with a robust cultural emphasis. The Catalan example reveals a conceptual weakness of Kohn’s distinction, which has failed to clearly distinguish the cultural from the ethnic. It shows how essential it is to detach and disentangle the concept of culture from the kin concept of ethnicity (Fenton 2010, pp. 20–23).

In pre-war Greece, the strictly ethnic character of Balkan nationalism barely left any space for alternative civic formulations. Therefore, the fate of Salonika should rather fall entirely outside the orbit of civic nationhood and entirely inside Hans Kohn’s paradigm of Eastern or ethnic nationalism. Yet, Kohn’s own description of Greece incorporates curious essentialist statements, such as: “With all their fierce nationalist ideology, the Greeks never developed into a nation in the modern sense. The desire for the formation of a Greek national state never became a force in their history” (Kohn 1944, p. 52). This seems to suggest a rather ahistorical approach. Today, few comparative scholars would take seriously the idea that there was some form of continuity between ancient and modern Greece.

One of the foremost historians of modern Greece, Paschalis Kitromilides, warned against the ‘national awakening’ assumption, positing “that the ’nation’, as a community of culture and social sentiments, preceded the state… Balkan nationalists appropriated these ideas and tried to endow their states with a long pre-statehood history of nationality and national assertion, glorifying, as a rule, their medieval past and seeking to establish uninterrupted continuities of national existence since the remotest antiquity. Western historians have shared and reproduced this assumption in their writing on Balkan politics and history” (Kitromilides 1989). In the study of nationalism, the ‘canonization’ of Greece has thus turned the country into a sort of ‘paradigm nation’ (Kitromilides 2009). Remaining obsessed with Antiquity, Kohn’s 1944 book seems quite uninformed about actual modern Greek history and contains barely any mention of the Balkan Wars.

According to Smith, Kohn posited the existence of a “rational, voluntaristic version of nationalism” against an “organic, deterministic variety”, the former emerging in England, America, France, and Holland, the latter emerging instead in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Asia (Smith 1998, p. 16). However, Smith recalled that the Romantic movement, one of the peculiarities Kohn wrongly identified as ‘Eastern’, was an eighteenth-century “British (English, Irish, Scots. and Welsh) movement and was developed by both the French and the Germans from the 1770s onwards” (Smith 1998, p. 54). As Smith argues elsewhere, the Kohnian cliché’ that a “voluntarist and civic-political nationalism required a strong, rational bourgeoisie to act as a ‘bearer class’ in the task of building and leading the mass citizen-nation … drew on and systematized a long tradition of often invidious classification of nations and nationalism” (Smith 2000, pp. 6–7).

Another facet left untouched by Kohn’s Western-centric analysis is that the explosive, shattering force of nationalism was universally accompanied by homogenizing Westernization. Westernizing elites were also modernizing elites, and modernity was itself identified with the West, to the point that nationalism was nearly unconceivable without its accompanying ideology, modernism, and this was entirely framed according to a deeply, radically Westernizing world vision (Conversi 2012a). Yet, if all forms of nationalism were part of a Westernizing drive by local elites, this begs the question of why the practical results were so obviously different in each of the case studies. We would need to explore why, in our specific case, the three port cities had witnessed such remarkably shifting patterns and developments in their diverging emphasis on civics, nationhood, ethnicity, and so on—and how their shared port conditions differently affected these outcomes. Moreover, Kohn’s model is sometimes amplified to fit other incongruous typologies, evolving, for instance, into the recurrent opposition of ‘civic peaceful’ versus ‘ethnic violence’. This opposition is, however, historically unfounded, as British and French nationalism cannot be said to be less warlike, even as German nationalism may have been more militarized (Conversi 2012a). Indeed, recent studies have proposed that the opposite is true with ‘violent civic nationalism’ contrasting ‘civil ethnic nationalism’ (Kreuzer 2006). Warlike situations radicalize both civic and ethnic nationalism; thus, the Western-inspired Balkan wars paved the way for a rapid rise of ethnic intolerance. This was an experience subsequently repeated during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Conversi 2003; Malešević 2022). War and violence simultaneously act as boundary destroyers and boundary makers (Conversi 1999). As Charles Tilly convincingly put it: “War itself became a homogenizing experience as soldiers and sailors represented the entire nation and the civilian population endured common privations and responsibilities” (Tilly 1992, p. 116).

Finally, Kohn’s dichotomy reflected a conceptual calque from Friedrich Meinecke’s (1862–1954) contrast between Staatsnation and Kulturnation. (Meinecke 1970).26 At first sight, the latter is supposedly shaped by language, traditions, culture, and religion rather than descent. Thus, independently from its origins, the centrality of culture would imply that the cultural nation is, in principle, distinct from the ethnic nation. However, in practice, Meinecke’s extreme ideological orientation was at odds with its own definition of the nation: He repeatedly engaged in xenophobic anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic propaganda, besides his warmongering support for German expansionism (Pois 1972). Although Kohn’s own distinction is not openly linked to Menecke, the latter is mostly cited in relation to his view of the ‘reason of state’ (Kohn 1944, pp. 579, 639–52 and 687). The German nationalist historian’s conflation of the cultural into the ethnic clearly reflected the nationalist Zeitgeist prevailing at the time, in which culture often seemed to overlap with ethnicity, each one lending support to the other.

Despite the conceptual limits of the civic-ethnic distinction, the historical evidence discussed above makes it hard to contemplate ideas about the similarity of nationalism across time and space. We need thus to dismiss the notion that there is no distinction between the various forms of nationalism. Such a distinction can be allowed in geo-spatial terms along a West–East axis, which takes into account great power rivalry and the West’s drive to carve up the remnants of the Ottoman empire. Is it possible to argue that the northern Mediterranean space running Eastward from Barcelona to Salonika represented a trajectory of deepening ethnicization, intolerance, and xenophobia? In many respects, yes: In a critique of Kohn’s framework, one author has argued that, at the level of popular understandings of nationhood, people define it in civic or ethnic terms differently in various contexts, lending some support for the regional component of the dichotomy, conceding that it argues that it is the intensity of national identifications rather than their qualitative nature (ethnic/civic) that correlates with xenophobia (Janmaat 2006).

The tragic fate of Salonika seems to proclaim loudly such truth, yet the Easternmost frontier and utter limit of these geopolitical trajectories is not situated in the Mediterranean but in the depth of Asia Minor. Here, a few years after the Ottoman Empire had lost Salonika, the end result was the almost total elimination and removal from the Turkish maps of the Armenian civilization. This may well represent the Easternmost epitome and triumph of the ethnic-centered nationalism in the span of times covered here, 1888–1915. The explosion of WW1 only deepened and expanded this ongoing process.

The three port cities have highlighted three possibilities along the ethnic-civic continuum. Whereas Naples and Barcelona do not easily fit Kohn’s dichotomy, following the Balkan wars (1912–1913), Salonika shifted abruptly from an enviable form of civic and pluralistic coexistence under Ottoman rule to one of the most extreme, exclusive, and eliminationist forms of ethnic nationalism.

7. Conclusions

Typologies are simplifying tools used to synthesize much broader trends and meanings. They are ultimately uncouth and lend themselves to crass generalizations and stereotyping. Yet, typologies cannot be easily discarded, as they may provide suggestive interpretive grids and more than a grain of truth. They are also potential descriptive tools for clarification, theorization, and broader policy considerations. I have charted Kohn’s over-used and two-pronged typology (civic/ethnic and East/West), considered its spurious origin as a product of the Cold War, and noted how it was misapplied by Kohn himself.

Yet, some typologies, if devoid of their historical errors and analytical simplifications, may indeed be circumstantially useful- at least if applied to the broader area going from the Iberian Peninsula to Turkey and Russia. If we look at a map and move our regard from West to East, we can easily associate it with a generalized pattern of deterioration of human, in particular ethnic, relations. However, this is far from being a ‘law’ or even a predictable pattern. Not only do islands of tolerance appear here and there in a sea of human destructiveness, but the very dichotomy cannot help explain intermediary cases such as Naples and possibly other cities, where the passive resistance to unification nationalism has led to a low-level conflict characterized by the absence or lack of a core organizational, civic principle.

Ports ideally represent both a symbolic and factual bridge, including an overture to the world and, thus, to other communities. Industrialization was shared by all three cities– to different degrees. Industrialism, as a broader cultural pattern, associated modernity with patterns of homogeneity, regularity, organization, cleansing, and replaceability (Conversi 2012b, 2022; Mandelbaum 2014, 2020). All three ports and surrounding areas witnessed major ‘regeneration’ and urban renewal schemes at approximately the same time. In the year 1888, parallel urban developments occurred in all three port cities: Barcelona’s universal exposition, Naples’ Risanamento, and Salonika’s infrastructural redevelopment under the Ottomans. These developments engendered (and responded to) gargantuan demographic, ideological, economic, cultural, and political changes. These changes were largely related to industrialization and its side effects, particularly urbanization.

The theory of the centrality of industrialization in processes of nation-formation (Conversi 2022; Gellner 1983) seems thus in need to be reasserted. However, this does not explain why, towards the end of the nineteenth century, what seemed to begin as broadly similar developments had yielded such dramatically different outcomes by the 1910s. The openness and outward-looking position of the port did not prevent genocidal intolerance when, as in Salonika, the port city was seized by nationalizing forces. Additionally, the way nations had been previously conceived via ideology, discourses, and narratives had a major impact, but an even greater major impact they had when these visions were seized, shared and imposed by violent states which arrogated- the claim to be the unique representation of their ‘nation states’- and backed this claim using naked force.

Expanding on the idea that, at least since 1500, the Mediterranean area shared a common historical experience ‘characterized by weak state structures’ and ‘muffled class formation’ (Burke 2012), resulting in both epistemic unity and cultural diversity, this article has compared three Mediterranean port cities. The strategic importance of port cities as fulcra and hubs behind vast hinterlands and connection points in the Mediterranean trade and cultural inter-changes seems to offer a privileged position to test current political typologies (Driessen 2005). This article has chosen three very distinct port cities in order to verify the validity of the much-abused opposition between Eastern vs. Western/ethnic vs. civic nationalism. Although the findings corroborate the geo-spatial distinction between patterns of diffusion of different forms of nationalism and divergent emphases on civic as opposed to ethnic notions of citizenship, the article has also revealed some crudeness and uncouthness in Kohn’s typology—particularly his idealization of modern Greece as expressing continuity with classical Greece, thus overlooking the fact that Greek nationalism in the early twentieth century could fit well, and in extreme forms, amongst those groups of nationalisms which Kohn collectively identify as ‘Eastern’ and ‘ethnic’ (Danforth 1995; Karakasidou 1997).

Over a century later, at the turn of the millennium, the three ports also witnessed different uses: Barcelona expanded its tourist and trade function, Naples became a magnet for smugglers and later for illegal Chinese imports of merchandise via the Camorra, while Salonika, which in the 1910a and 1920s had witnessed the arrival of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor’s ethnic cleansing, mostly of whom were resettled in Jewish and Turkish houses, lost its former status as a cosmopolitan port.

By 1915, several years after Salonika’s incorporation, the Armenian genocide (Akçam 2012; Levene 2014b) and Italy’s unpredictable and virulent entrance into WW1 (Thompson 2010) signaled the end of an era of ethnic coexistence and religious pluralism, with the advent of radically centralizing nation-states. WW1, with its long sequels—including the rise of fascism, WW2, and the Holocaust—resulted in the eradication of minorities by mutually exclusive nationalist visions, a process that culminated during the Nazi occupation of Greece with the extermination of the remaining Jewish population in the Nazi concentration camps.