Contemporary European History (2021), page 1 of 23 doi:10.1017/S0960777321000084 ARTICLE Mapping the Margins: National Borders, Transnational Networks and Images of Coherence in Interwar Italy and Yugoslavia Matthew Worsnick Department of History of Art and Architecture, Vanderbilt University, PMB 274, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN 37203-5721, United States
[email protected] This article analyses the relationship between charted (drawn) maps and mental maps of the contested bor- der-region between Italy and Yugoslavia following the First World War. Drawing upon graphic and verbal depictions of tourist routes, railways, supply chains, demographics, topographic features and telephone and telegraph lines, the article analyses representations of an unstable border at a moment of peak uncertainty. In so doing, it reveals the centrality of architects, engineers, tourist bureaus, artists and cartographers in forging an imaginary geography that correlated with emerging political divisions in post-war Europe. On both sides of the contested border, cartography was utilised to change the way people conceived political geography. Maps, the article argues, both revealed existing mental maps and helped to shape new ones. In 1918, a group of international diplomats convened to redraw the map of central, eastern and south- eastern Europe. This language of ‘redrawing the map’ is regularly recited in studies of the end of the First World War, a moment when more than a dozen new states were founded in lands that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires.1 But what did such an idea mean on the ground? In what ways would these invisible, often arbitrary political boundaries become realities in daily lives? Charted maps created in this period offer us some clues.