The Monument to Dante in Trento. Trento and Trieste, the main goals of Italian irredentists, were annexed by Italy at the end of WW1.
Map of the territories claimed by the proponents of a Greater Italy. Some Italian factions used irredentist arguments to promote the annexation of many other territories beyond Trento and Trieste.

Italian irredentism (Italian: irredentismo italiano [irredenˈtizmo itaˈljaːno]) was a political movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Kingdom of Italy. It originated to promote the annexation of majority Italian-speaking territories which were still retained by the Austrian Empire after three wars of independence (1848–1849, 1859 and 1866); specifically, Trento and Trieste were designated as the main "irredent lands". Both provinces were ultimately annexed as a result of World War I, considered in Italian discourse to be the "fourth war of independence": the conclusion of the conflict on November 4, 1918, is still commemorated in Italy as National Unity Day. Thereafter, Italian irredentism waned in importance; however, Italian nationalists and fascists would use irredentist arguments to justify the Italianization of other territories Italy annexed in World War I (such as South Tyrol and the Slavic parts of Istria) and claim many other lands beyond Trento and Trieste. Those latter policies and claims have been abandoned by the Italian Republic.[1]

Overview

Animated map of the Italian unification from 1829 to 1871

Even after the Capture of Rome (1871), the final event of the unification of Italy, many ethnic Italian speakers (Trentino-Alto Adigan Italians, Savoyard Italians, Corfiot Italians, Niçard Italians, Swiss Italians, Corsican Italians, Maltese Italians, Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) remained outside the borders of the Kingdom of Italy and this situation created the Italian irredentism. Up until World War I, the main "irredent lands" (terre irredente) were considered to be the provinces of Trento and Trieste and, in a narrow sense, irredentists referred to the Italian patriots living in these two areas.[1]

The term was later expanded to also include multilingual and multiethnic areas, where Italians were a relative majority or a substantial minority, within the northern Italian region encompassed by the Alps, with German, Italian, Slovene, Croatian, Ladin and Istro-Romanian population, such as South Tyrol, Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca and part of Dalmatia. The claims were further extended also to the city of Fiume, Corsica, the island of Malta, the County of Nice and Italian Switzerland.[1][2]

After the end of World War I, the Italian irredentist movement largely disappeared in its original form, having achieved the goal of annexing Trento and Trieste; it was, however, hegemonised, manipulated and distorted by fascism, which made it an instrument of nationalist propaganda, placed at the center of a policy, conditioned by belated imperial ambitions, which took the form of "forced Italianizations", in the aspiration for the birth of a Great Italy and a vast Italian Empire.[3] After World War II, Italian irredentism disappeared along with the defeated Fascists and the Monarchy of the House of Savoy. After the Treaty of Paris (1947) and the Treaty of Osimo (1975), the territorial claims of Fascist Italy were abandoned by the Italian Republic (see Foreign relations of Italy).[4]

Italian ethnic regions claimed in the 1930s:

Characteristics

Italian irredentism was not a formal organization but rather an opinion movement, advocated by several different groups, claiming that Italy had to reach its "natural borders" or unify territories inhabited by Italians.[1] Similar nationalistic ideas were common in Europe in the late 19th century. The term irredentism, coined from the Italian word, came into use in many countries (see List of irredentist claims or disputes). This idea of Italia irredenta is not to be confused with the Risorgimento, the historical events that led to irredentism, nor with nationalism or Imperial Italy, the political philosophy that took the idea further under fascism.

During the 19th century, Italian irredentism fully developed the characteristic of defending the Italian language from other people's languages, such as, for example, German in Switzerland and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire or French in Nice and Corsica.

The liberation of Italia irredenta was perhaps the strongest motive for Italy's entry into World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 satisfied many irredentist claims.[5]

Italian irredentism has the characteristic of being originally moderate, requesting only the return to Italy of the areas with Italian majority of population,[6] but after World War I it became aggressive – under fascist influence – and claimed to the Kingdom of Italy even areas where Italians were a minority or had been present only in the past. In the first case, there were the Risorgimento claims on Trento, while in the second, there were the fascist claims on the Ionian Islands, Savoy and Malta.

History

Origins

Monument to Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican hero who made Italian the official language of his Corsican Republic in 1755

The Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli was called "the precursor of Italian irredentism" by Niccolò Tommaseo because he was the first to promote the Italian language and socio-culture (the main characteristics of Italian irredentism) in his island; Paoli wanted the Italian language to be the official language of the newly founded Corsican Republic.

Pasquale Paoli's appeal in 1768 against the French invader said:

Paoli's Corsican Constitution of 1755 was written in Italian, and the short-lived university he founded in the city of Corte in 1765 used Italian as the official language. Paoli was sympathetic to Italian culture and regarded his own native language as an Italian dialect (Corsican is an Italo-Dalmatian tongue closely related to Tuscan).

After the Italian unification and Third Italian War of Independence in 1866, there were areas with Italian-speaking communities within the borders of several countries around the newly created Kingdom of Italy. The irredentists sought to annex all those areas to the newly unified Italy. The areas targeted were Corsica, Dalmatia, Gorizia, Istria, Malta, County of Nice, Ticino, small parts of Grisons and of Valais, Trentino, Trieste and Fiume.[8]

Different movements or groups founded in this period included the Italian politician Matteo Renato Imbriani inventing the new term terre irredente ("unredeemed lands") in 1877; in the same year the movement Associazione in pro dell'Italia Irredenta ("Association for the Unredeemed Italy") was founded; in 1885 the Pro Patria movement ("For Fatherland") was founded and in 1891 the Lega Nazionale Italiana ("Italian National League") was founded in Trento and Trieste (in the Austrian Empire).[9]

Initially, the movement can be described as part of the more general nation-building process in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the multi-national Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires were being replaced by nation-states. The Italian nation-building process can be compared to similar movements in Germany (Großdeutschland), Hungary, Serbia and in pre-1914 Poland. Simultaneously, in many parts of 19th-century Europe liberalism and nationalism were ideologies which were coming to the forefront of political culture. In Eastern Europe, where the Habsburg Empire had long asserted control over a variety of ethnic and cultural groups, nationalism appeared in a standard format. The beginning of the 19th century "was the period when the smaller, mostly indigenous nationalities of the empire – Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Ukrainians, Romanians – remembered their historical traditions, revived their native tongues as literary languages, reappropriated their traditions and folklore, in short, reasserted their existence as nations".[10]