Revanchism

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Revanchism (from French revanche, "revenge") is a term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or geo-political factors. Extreme revanchist ideologues often represent a hawkish stance, suggesting that desired objectives can be reclaimed in the positive outcome of another war.

Revanchism is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains "unredeemed" outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state. Revanchist politics often rely on the identification of a nation with a nation-state, often mobilizing deep-rooted sentiments of ethnic nationalism, claiming territories outside of the state where members of the ethnic group live, while using heavy-handed nationalism to mobilize support for these aims. Revanchist justifications are often presented as based on ancient, or even autochthonous occupation of a territory, known by the German term Urrecht, meaning a nation's claim to territory that has been inhabited since "time immemorial", an assertion that is always inextricably involved in revanchism and irredentism, justifying them in the eyes of their proponents.

Motivations of territorial aggression and counter aggression are as old as tribal societies, but the instance of modern revanchism that gave these furious groundswells of opinion their modern name lie in the strong desire in the French Third Republic to regain Alsace-Lorraine after the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the ensuing Treaty of Frankfurt. For example, the Radical Socialist Party's Georges Clemenceau opposed participation in the scramble for Africa and others adventures that would divert the Republic from objectives related to the "blue line of the Vosges" (Alsace-Lorraine). This ultra-nationalist tradition influenced French politics up to 1921 and was one of the major reasons France went to great pains to woo Russia over to its side, resulting in the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, followed by a series of accords, including the Triple Entente, which included the three central Allied powers of World War I: France, Great Britain, and Russia.

There are a number of other historical examples, past and present, which relate to revanchism. Revanchist sentiments may have been behind two 19th-century wars between the Kingdom of Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein (the First war of Schleswig 1848-1851 and the Second war of Schleswig in 1864).

However, another notable revanchist movement was that which took place in Germany following World War I. Pangermanists within the German Weimar Republic called for the reclamation of territories considered to be the "rightful" property of a German State due to pre-war borders or because of the land-in-question's historical relationship to Germanic peoples. Such sentiment, known as irredentism, called for the incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine, the Polish Corridor and the Sudentenland (see Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia). This had also been characteristic of the Völkisch movement in general and of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pangermanic League), which was a motivating factor behind German unification in 1871.

Similar sentiments prevailed in post-World War I Hungary, which called for a revision of the borders set up by the Treaty of Trianon, especially regarding Transylvania within Romania.

Modern revanchist politics often center around certain areas of historic competition and claims of ownership, as in the case of Carpathian Ruthenia and Israel/Palestine. As part of the recurring immigration debates in the United States, anti-illegal immigration groups have raised the specter of a "reconquista" (reconquest) of the American Southwest by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Much of the Southwest was originally part of Mexico, prior to being annexed by the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. There has never been a significant movement among Mexicans or Mexican-Americans to return the conquered lands to Mexico, although anti-illegal immigration groups have argued that there is an erasure of the borders between these two countries due to massive immigration and separatist sentiments allegedly held by new immigrants. Statements made by the National Council of La Raza about "resettling" the mythical kingdom of Aztlan have helped to make the immigration debate more tense still. Neil Smith outlines the contemporary theory of revanchism in the context of urban regeneration in his book "The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City" (1996).