Irredentism

The desire of a state to “recover” territory previously lost to another state, typically on the basis of uniting similar ethnic groups or on the grounds of prior historical claim. Irredentism is a policy rooted in territoriality and the organic theory of the state, and had a profound effect on the geopolitics of the 19th and 20th centuries. Irredentism is a common aspect of the foreign policies of countries occupying a shatterbelt, because boundaries often shift in such locations, leaving ethnic groups divided among two or more nation-states. A synonym is revanchism, a term derived from the French word revanche, meaning “revenge.” Irredentism comes from the Italian term irredenta, which referred to lands populated by ethnic Italians that were not incorporated into the Italian state during the Risorgimento, or Italian unification, during the 19th century. A number of such territories existed, including Trieste, Nice, and Corsica. Several of the irredenta lay within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Italian government entered World War I on the side of the Allied Powers with the expectation that a defeat of the Austrians would open the way for the absorption of these places into Italy. Over the course of the 20th century, several of the disputed territories in fact were included in the boundaries of Italy. The collapse of empires usually results in the expression of irredentist motives on the part of the remnant states, since the existing cultural landscape of ethnicity rarely correlates directly with the new political borders marking off the new states.