Commemoration and radical right-wing populism in European borderlands: A power geometries approach to frontier fascism in Trieste

The success of radical right-wing populist (RRWP) parties is based on discourses displaying “power geometries” (Massey 1993, 1999). These involve the representation of power relations, with on one side a globalized elite, boosting the mobility of human beings, goods and capital across borders, and on the other side, a territorially embedded people subject to this borderless mobility. Power geometries can also be used to approach the chameleonic behavior of RRWP politicians and their allies in the political space. The article uses this concept to interpret the attitude of the Trieste City Executive and the reactions to it when it commemorated a past connected to Italian fascism. The results show that the power geometries involving the RRWP and their allies in European borderlands can lead to discursive ambivalence in two overlapping spaces: the territorial and state-bordered space of representative democracy, and the topological and cross-border space of para-diplomacy.