Irredentism

6 Key excerpts on "Irredentism"

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  Irredentism

  Ethnic Conflict and International Politics

  • Thomas Ambrosio(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  10 18 Irredentism: Ethnic Conflict and International Politics Irredentism is the most extreme manifestation of homeland nationalism, as it involves attempts to annex the territory of another state in order to protect its co-nationals. In the irredentist state, the 'remedial' nature of nationalism is the belief that the state and nation are somehow incomplete because there is a mis- match between the two and the interests and rights of the nation as a whole are not (and likely cannot) be satisfied unless all members of the nation dwell within the same polity. Bringing all the members of the nation into the same state is seen as a way to make the nation whole and is a very powerful moti- vating force for collective action. As Misha Glenny notes: "Most national- isms are based on the assumption that a state which encompasses all mem- bers of one nation can overcome all major social and economic evils. This is a deeply irrational assumption ... [that many nations] unwittingly espouse." 11 This being said, the domestic-level variable, the level of ethno-territorial nationalism, is defined as the degree to which the state advocates and pursues policies based upon the premise that the political and national unit should be congruent. This variable is necessary for Irredentism: without an ideology that calls for unification of the state and the nation, irredentist projects will find no significant resonance in a nation's body politic. Explanation of Ethno-Territorial Nationalism Although the writings on Irredentism are meager, there is a plethora of works that attempt to explain the rise of nationalism and the resulting ethnic conflict. Indeed, the large number of possible causes poses its own problem in maneuvering through this vast literature.

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  The Making of Nagorno-Karabagh

  From Secession to Republic

  • Levon Chorbajian(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As a consequence, the greater the degree of resolve of the respective sides, the more unyielding their bargaining strategies, and the higher the probability of crisis escalation. The purpose of this chapter is to study the emergence of irreden- tist conflicts, and the role of ethnicity in the context of Armenian 54 L. Chorbajian, The Making of Nagorno-Karabagh © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001 Lalig Papazian 55 irredentist demands over Nagorno-Karabagh in 1988. At the time, Nagorno-Karabagh was an autonomous region inside the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Grievances by the Armenian majority led to irre- dentist demands and culminated in Armenian–Azeri conflict that esca- lated to become one of the most violent in the former Soviet Union. Irredentism An ethnic conflict involving territorial demands can be identified as irredentist, when there is a “movement by members of an ethnic group in one state to retrieve ethnically kindred people and their territory across borders,” 2 or “a historical claim made by a sovereign state to the land and people of another state with the justification that such a sep- aration was forced and illegal”. 3 “(I)t is an outcome of the acceptance of the principle of nationalism, the state in which ethnic, cultural and political boundaries coincide”. 4 Irredentism is also referred to as “polit- ical efforts to unite ethnically, geographically or historically related seg- ments of a population in adjacent countries within a common political framework”, stressing the importance of people and the land they occupy in the determination of the frontiers of a state. 5 Such move- ments either attempt to detach land and people from one state and incorporate them into an existing state, or seek to detach land and people among several states to incorporate them in a new state. 6 The former presupposes the existence of a state, while the second aims to establish one.

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  For Kin or Country

  Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War

  • Stephen M. Saideman, R. William Ayres(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Irredentism and Its Absence International Pressures Versus Domestic Dynamics In politics it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

  —CHARLES DE GAULLE

  C LEARLY, AN IRREDENTIST POLICY IS LIKELY TO be costly. Irredentism risks war with one’s neighbors, and war is always a costly process, regardless of outcome. Any effort to (re)unify territories inhabited by ethnic kin will certainly antagonize neighboring states whose lands are sought. Further, such foreign policies are likely to alienate the neighbor’s allies, and perhaps even other countries facing similar threats. As we will explore in subsequent chapters, Irredentism has brought substantial costs—in deaths, damage, and economic hardship—to states that have pursued it. Our starting point, therefore, is this basic question: why would states do such an apparently irrational thing?

  Several analyses of Irredentism (MacMahon 1998; Ambrosio 2001) emphasize international constraints, so we need to consider the importance of external forces, particularly boundary norms (Zacher 2001) and the pressures of the international community. Similarly, there has been an outpouring of scholarly work asserting that efforts by the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to “condition” the behavior of the Eastern European states through their admission procedures are responsible for keeping peace in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism.1 However, one basic observation driving this project is that countries sometimes engage in policies that are counterproductive to the point of self-destruction.2

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  Encyclopedia of Geography Terms, Themes, and Concepts

  • Reuel R. Hanks(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  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 col- lapse 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 corre- lates directly with the new political borders marking off the new states. The consequences of irredentist foreign policies have frequently been severe, leading to larger conflicts. Both the world wars of the 20th century were at least partially caused by irredentist motivations. Gavrilo Princip, a member of a radical Serbian irredentist group, killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo. The assassination set into motion a series of events that quickly erupted into World War I, and ultimately the death of approximately 16 million people. Ironically, the creation of Yugoslavia as a result of the war partially fulfilled the ambition of Princip and his fellow irredentist conspirators. In the 1930s, Germany under Adolf Hitler began pursuing an aggressive irredentist policy under the guise of lebens- raum, or “living room,” for the German state.

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  Italy and Its Eastern Border, 1866-2016

  • Marina Cattaruzza(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2  From Irredentism to Nationalism

  1 Irredentism and Power Politics

  Just a few years after its rise, Irredentism began to move away from its original roots in Mazzinian thought and to change the scope of its ambitions, adapting them to the foreign policy of the newly-born nation state. The revival of Cesare Balbo’s theses led people to focus their attention on the compensations that Italy could demand in exchange for an hypothetical Austrian expansion into the Balkan Peninsula, overestimated in its extent if not its likelihood.1 Federico Chabod accurately remarked that Irredentism itself ended up by territorializing the national problem, thus abandoning any universalistic aspirations.2

  This ideological and theoretical shift in how to accomplish national unification occurred as the political and cultural climate changed in Europe as a whole. After reaching their zenith in the democratic and national movements of the years 1848–89, Romantic ideals were replaced by a more prosaic Realpolitik, embodied by the German Chancellor Bismarck and his bold policy of alliances. As Chabod remarked: “Romanticism’s ideals and lifestyles waned; very different ones took hold instead, characterized no doubt by a lowering of the moral and cultural tone, as much as by a significant broadening of their reach.”3

  As the nation became an end in itself, a conservative and stabilizing component within the renewed concert of European powers, the link between the concepts of nation and freedom, theorized by Mazzini, among others, came untied. Even though Mazzinianism was part of the extreme Left—a small minority with a handful of deputies in the Italian Parliament, and with ties to the (at times conspiratorial) network of republican associations—its original ideology began to morph to the point of contributing to the early expression of the goals of power politics and imperialist expansion.

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  States and Nationalism in Europe since 1945

  • Malcolm Anderson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Irredentism and separatism The most important claim that can be made for nationalism is that it changed the political map of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the late twentieth century, however, there has been a change – modifications of the frontiers between states has become a rare occurrence. The upheavals in Eastern Europe, following 1989, created new states but without changing frontiers because the successor states respected, in ex-Yugoslavia with much difficulty, the internal boundaries of the states from which they emerged. Seizing territory by armed force, a commonplace until the end of the Second World War, is now very difficult, as the Israelis have discovered. This represents a major change in the international system and has important implications for nationalism. Nations historically were forged by armed conflict which either brought together disparate territories, as in the United Kingdom and France, and assimilated, with more or less success, the peoples who inhabited them, or, as in the case of Germany and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century, unified culturally similar peoples. Violence seemed inseparable from state and nation building, and the two seemed interconnected. Has this process run its course? Does relative territorial stability mark a weakening of nationalist ideas and passion? Are national identities being shaped in ways other than war and violence? Is it possible that new identities may emerge but as a result of different processes to those of the past? TERRITORIAL CLAIMS In the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, the most common territorial claims by nationalists were based on irredentist and separatist demands. The first, derived from the Latin terra irredenta, was for ‘unredeemed land’, territory which belonged to a people by right but was under the control of another state

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