Irredentism

The term ‘irredentism’ is an offshoot of the Italian national movement, the risorgimento; it refers to the part of the Italian ‘nation’ still outside the free Italian state, not yet redeemed from foreign bondage. The yearning of the Slaves’ Chorus in Verdi's Nabucco (‘Va pensiero, sull’ali dorate’) reverberated throughout Europe: lack of freedom was everywhere considered tantamount to foreign bondage, a domestic exile. Italy saw Italians outside its frontiers, under Habsburg rule, from Istria to Tyrol, and the agenda of independence was soon translated into an agenda of territorial expansion so as to embrace unredeemed Italy, Italia Irredenta, into the free homeland. One of the most arresting episodes of this irredentist urge is provided by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938): originally a sensuous-sentimental poet, his elitism and adoration for the ideas of Nietzsche gradually made him list to the ideology of authoritarianism and fascism. He took a strongly belligerent stance in the First World War. He lost an eye, and staged the remarkable stunt of dropping propaganda leaflets on Vienna in 1918. Himself a heroic and charismatic fighter pilot, his fighter squadron was called ‘La Serenissima’, a reference to Venice (until recently part of the Habsburg empire). After the war, D’Annunzio went as far as seizing, like a newfangled Garibaldi, the Istrian town of Rijeka/Fiume with a 700-strong band of followers, proclaiming himself Duce of the new territory. And successfully so: although the arrangements made at the Paris Peace Conference had stipulated otherwise, Fiume was subsequently attached to Italy.

Irredentism is by no means unique to the Italian case. In almost every instance where a national independence movement achieves territorial incorporation as a new state, there will be disputes as to the territorial outlines of that state. In each case, the logic of nationalism will urge a territorial expansion so as to include all fellow-nationals within the new state's territory. Additionally, once established frontiers have been raised as an issue owing to national movements, the demands of geopolitics will often also lead to expansionist claims. Thus, as has been mentioned, the Prime Minister of a newly independent Serbia, Ilija Garašanin, formulated a Draft Plan (nacartanije) in the late 1840s calling for a Greater Serbia, based, not only on the national (anti-Ottoman) ideal of a united Slavic-Orthodox state in the Balkans, but also on the geopolitical needs for Serbia to have seaports at the Adriatic and the Black Sea.