6 - From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions: The Fractal Structures of Political Identity in Civil Wars

Summary

As Robert Gildea has noted, and as was mentioned in Part I, wartime occupation often had the effect of drastically curtailing the scope of social networks and political frameworks, as people struggled to survive within the narrow sphere of their own immediate communities and families.¹ Yet the experience of occupation also had a transnational dimension. Occupations redrew, redefined, or did away with political and national boundaries across much of Eurasia and beyond. Occupying powers fashioned ideological rationales for their imperial expansion, some of which were designed to engage the support of various sectors within the occupied populations. In some cases, pre-war networks of transnational affinity and exchange were activated or exploited under the transformed circumstances of occupation. By the same token, resistance to occupation was often informed by ideals as well as organizational and experiential connections that transcended political and ethno-national boundaries. Moreover, in many countries, those who did not fully “belong” to the nation – notably, members of marginalized minorities as well as foreign nationals, who were particularly vulnerable to repression and violence on the part of occupation authorities and collaborationist regimes – were disproportionately represented among the ranks of resistance movements. Examples include the many Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, and other “others” who joined the ranks of the French resistance, the Macedonian Slavs who contributed significantly to the rank-and-file of Communist forces in Greece (particularly in the 1946–49 phase of that country’s civil war), and the Italian soldiers who joined the ranks of the (already multi-ethnic) Yugoslav partisans as well as the Greek resistance rather than fall captive to the Germans after September 1943.²