ABSTRACT
Italy’s three major non-Italian speaking ethnic minority regions are located along its northern boundary with France (the French-speaking Val d’Aosta); with Austria (the German-speaking South Tyrol); and with Slovenia and Austria (the Slovene-speaking area of eastern Friuli). In each region, the ethnic minority is distinct in its location and size, its relative importance within the region, its transborder relations with the neighbour state, and its role in the Italian body politic. Taken together, these three regions account for a sizeable proportion of Italy’s official minority language speakers, and over 80 per cent if one excludes Friulian and Sardian. Each has evolved political parties to protect its linguistic and territorial integrity and to articulate its cultural interests – the Union Valdôtaine (UV) in the Val d’Aosta, the Süidtiroler Volkspartei (SVP) and the Partito Autonomista Trentino Tirolese (PATT) in the South Tyrol, and the Solvenska Skupnost (SSK) in eastern Friuli. Throughout their history these parties operated totally independent of one another and exclusively within their own regions in partisan support for the ethnic group they represent and for their vested interest in cultural autonomy from the Italian state. There is no record of meetings held among them and certainly no example of collective action prior to 1994. Indeed, the Italian government had always treated these borderland minorities separately and hence had discouraged any common policy. Yet on 18 November 1994, in Bolzano, capital and largest city of the South Tyrol, and again on 28 February 1996 in the mountain resort and gambling casino town of Saint-Vincent in the Val d’Aosta, the leaders of these political parties met together to discuss common problems and to agree upon a collective political agenda for the following year – a ‘common cause’ that would best support their own aims by joint action in gaining recognition and concessions from the national government in Rome, and also from the regional government of the particular region. 1 Clearly, by late 1994, the political situation in Italy had deteriorated to a point at which these minority groups felt so threatened that they agreed upon this unprecedented step – to join in a common cause.
