Cross-border identity as a daily resistance tactic in a time of global health emergency: Gorizia-Nova Gorica go borderless

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ulrich Beck represented risk society as the overcoming of the nation states as the container of the respective civil societies. The social contract which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom in favour of the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom especially of movement of people segregated within the apparently resurging nation states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Yet ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people's everyday life as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represents what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life.