Italian irredentism (in Italian: irredentismo) was an Italian Irredentist movement that (in the late 19th century and early 20th century) aimed at the unification of all ethnically Italian peoples.
Originally, the movement promoted the annexation to Italy of territories inhabited by an Italian indigenous population but retained by the Austrian Empire after Third Italian War of Independence in 1866 (hence 'unredeemed' Italy). These included Trentino and Trieste, but also multilingual areas with German, Slovene, Croat, Ladin and Istro-Romanian population such as South Tyrol, a part of Istria, Gorizia, and part of Dalmatia. The claims were extended later to the city of Fiume (Rijeka), Corsica, the island of Malta, the County of Nice, and Italian Switzerland.
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Italian Irredentism was not a formal organization, it was rather an opinion movement, advocated by several different groups, that claimed that Italy had to reach its "natural borders" or unify territories inhabited by Italians. Similar nationalistic ideas were common in Europe in the late 19th century. The term 'irredentism' was successfully coined from the Italian word in many countries in the world (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 Greater Italy, the political philosophy that took the idea further under fascism.
The beginning of Irredentism in Italy was originated as a consequence of the French expansion in Italy that started with the annexation of Corsica in 1768 and was followed by Napoleon's inclusion - inside the territories of France's First French Empire - of the regions of Piedmont, Liguria and Tuscany. Indeed, Pasquale Paoli, the hero of Corsica, was called "the precursor of Italian irredentism" by Niccolo Tommaseo because he was the first to promote Italian language and socio-culture (the main characteristics of Italian irredentism) in his island. Corsica is one of the biggest islands in the Italian geography, and Pasquale Paoli wanted the Italian language to be the official language of his Corsican Republic; even his Corsican Constitution of 1755 was in Italian and the short-lived university he founded in the city of Corte in 1765 used Italian.
During the 19th century the Italian irredentism fully developed the characteristic of defending the Italian language from other people's languages (like, for example, the German in Switzerland and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the French in Nice).
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.[1]
Indeed Italian irredentism has even the characteristic of being originally moderate, requesting only the return to Italy of the areas with Italian majority of population,[2] but after World War I it became aggressive - under fascist influence - and claimed to the Kingdom of Italy even areas where Italians were minority or had been present only in the past. In the first case there were the Risorgimento claims on Trento, for example, while in the second there were the fascist claims on the Ionian Islands, Savoy and Malta.
To avoid confusion and in line with convention, this article uses modern English place names throughout. However, most places have alternative names in Italian. See List of Italian place names in Dalmatia.
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, including some areas with a non-Italian majority. The areas targeted were Corsica, Dalmatia, Gorizia, the Ionian islands, Istria, Malta, County of Nice, Ticino, Trentino, Trieste and Fiume.
Different movements or groups born in this period: in 1877 the Italian politician Matteo Renato Imbriani invented the new term "terre irredente" ("unredeemed lands"); in the same year the movement Associazione in pro dell'Italia Irredenta ("Association for the Unredeemed Italy") was founded; in the 1885 was founded the Pro Patria movement ("For Fatherland") and in 1891 the "Lega Nazionale Italiana" ("Italian National League") was founded in Trento and Trieste (in the Austrian Empire).
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, however, 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."[3] The notion of a single united Italy was related to the aspirations of the "majority populations".
A precursor of the 'Irredentists' was perhaps the unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi who, in 1859 as deputy for his native Nice in the Piedmontese parliament at Turin, attacked Cavour for ceding Nice to Napoleon III in order to get French help and approval for Italian Unification. Irredentism grew in importance in Italy in the next years.
On July 21, 1878, a noisy public meeting was held at Rome with Menotti Garibaldi, the son of Giuseppe Garibaldi, as chairman of the forum, and a clamour was raised for the formation of volunteer battalions to conquer the Trentino. Benedetto Cairoli, then Prime Minister of Italy, treated the agitation with tolerance.
It was, however, mainly superficial, as most Italians did not wish a dangerous policy against Austria, and even less against France for the sake of Nice and Corsica, or against Britain for Malta.
One consequence of Irredentist ideas outside of Italy was an assassination plot organized against the Emperor Francis Joseph in Trieste in 1882, which was detected and foiled. Guglielmo Oberdan, a Triestine and thus Austrian citizen, was executed. When the Irredentist movement became troublesome to Italy through the activity of Republicans and Socialists, it was subject to effective police control by Agostino Depretis.
Irredentism faced a setback when the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 started a crisis in French–Italian relations. The government entered into relations with Austria and Germany, which took shape with the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1882.
The Irredentists' dream of absorbing the targeted areas into Italy made no further progress in the 19th century, as the borders of the Kingdom of Italy remained unchanged and the Rome government began to set up colonies in Eritrea and Somalia in Africa.
See also: The Kingdom of Italy's entry into World War I and Italy in World War I - from neutrality to intervention
Italy signed the London Pact and entered World War I with the intention of gaining those territories perceived by Irredentists as being Italian under foreign rule. According to the pact, Italy was to leave the Triple Alliance and join the Entente Powers. Furthermore, Italy was to declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary within a month. The declaration of war was duly published on 23 May 1915.[4] In exchange, Italy was to obtain various territorial gains at the end of the war. In April 1918, in what he described as an open letter "to the American Nation" Paolo Thaon di Revel, Commander in Chief of the Italian navy, appealed to the people of the United States to support Italian territorial claims over Trento, Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and the Adriatic, writing that "we are fighting to expel an intruder from our home."[5]
The outcome of the First World War and the consequent settlement of the Treaty of Saint-Germain met some Italian claims, including many (but not all) of the aims of the Italia irredenta party.[6] Italy gained Trieste, Gorizia, Istria and the city of Zadar (Zara). In Dalmatia, despite the Treaty of London, only territories with Italian majority as Zadar with some Dalmatian islands, such as Cres (Cherso), Lošinj (Lussino) and Lastovo (Lagosta) were annexed by Italy, because Woodrow Wilson, supporting Yugoslav claims and not recognizing the treaty, rejected Italian requests on other Dalmatian territories.
The city of Rijeka (Fiume) in the Kvarner was the subject of claim and counter-claim (see Italian Regency of Carnaro, Treaty of Rapallo, 1920 and Treaty of Rome, 1924) and become Italian in 1924..
The stand taken by the irredentist Gabriele D'Annunzio, which briefly led him to become an enemy of the Italian state,[7] was meant to provoke a nationalist revival through Corporatism (first instituted during his rule over Fiume), in front of what was widely perceived as state corruption engineered by governments such as Giovanni Giolitti's.
D'Annunzio briefly annexed to this "Regency of Carnaro" even the Dalmatian islands of Krk (Veglia) and Rab (Arbe), where there was a numerous Italian community.
Fascist Italy strove to be seen as the natural result of war heroism, against a "betrayed Italy" that had not been awarded all it "deserved", as well as appropriating the image of Arditi soldiers. In this vein, irredentist claims were expanded and often used in Fascist Italy's desire to control the Mediterranean basin.
In 1922 Mussolini temporarily occupied Corfu, using irredentist claims based on minorities of Italians in the Ionian islands of Greece. Similar tactics may have been used towards the islands around the Kingdom of Italy - through the Pro-Italian Maltese, Corfiot Italians and Corsican Italians - in order to control the Mediterranean sea (that he called in Latin Mare Nostrum).
Around 1939, the main territories sought by fascist irredentism included the rest of Dalmatia, the Ionian Islands (in Greece), Malta, Corsica, Nice, Savoy and Ticino. Other claims were also made for the Fourth Shore, which meant coastal Libya and Tunisia, and the Dodecanese islands of the Aegean Sea.
After the occupation of Albania in April 1939, Mussolini sent nearly 11,000 Italian colonists to Albania (and started to create irredentism ideals related to Albania). Most of them were from the Venice area and Sicily. They settled primarily in the areas of Durrës, Vlorë, Skadar, Porto Palermos, Elbasan and Saranda. They were the first settlers of a huge group of Italians to be moved to Albania to create the Greater Italy of the Mussolini "dreams".[8]
During World War II, large parts of Dalmatia were annexed by Italy into the Governorship of Dalmatia from 1941 to 1943. Corsica and Nice were also administratively annexed by the Kingdom of Italy in November 1942. Malta was heavily bombed but was not occupied, due to Allied naval control of the Mediterranean and the success of Operation Pedestal, one of the most important[9] British strategic victories of the Second World War.
After Italian capitulation in 1943, areas formerly under Italian control in Istria and the Julian March (Italian: Venezia Giulia) were temporarily controlled by Yugoslav Partisans. Shortly afterward these areas were occupied by the German Wehrmacht and SS forces, which drove away Josip Broz Tito's Partisans and found the remains of several hundred killed Italians, executed by Yugoslav partisan troops.[10]
After 1945, many Italians were murdered in the Foibe killings and up to 270,000 (according to other sources up to 350.000) of them left these territories and moved mainly to Italy.[11]
As a consequence, there was a very significant decline in Italian speaking populations in Istria and Dalmatia.[12]
The Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli calculated that Italian was the primary spoken language by almost 30% of the Dalmatian population at the beginning of the Napoleonic wars.[13] Bartoli's evaluation was followed by other claims: Auguste de Marmont, the French Governor General of the Napoleonic Illyrian Provinces commissioned a census in 1814–1815 which found that Dalmatian Italians comprised 25% of the total population of Dalmatia. Accordingly, three years later, an Austrian census found around 70,000 Italians in a total of 301,000 people living in Austrian Dalmatia.
With the development of Slav nationalism, critics such as Croatian historian Duško Večerina, asserted that these evaluations were not conducted by modern scientific standards and that they took spoken language as the criterion, rather than ethnicity. They pointed out that, according to a report by Imperial court councillor Joseph Fölch in 1827, the Italian language was spoken by noblemen and some citizens of middle and lower classes exclusively in the coastal cities of Zara, Sebenico, and Spalato. Since only around 20,000 people populated these towns and not all were Italian speakers, their real number was rather smaller, probably around 7% of the total population, as is asserted by the Department of Historical Studies of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU).[14]
Not only Italian irredentists (like Gabriele D'Annunzio) but also Italian prominent scholars (like Angelo Vivante) alleged that Joseph Fölch did not include the Dalmatian islands of Cres, Lošinj, Vis, Hvar, Korcula and many others islands with significant Italian communities. And so -in their opinion- Folch did only a partial and mistaken estimate of the real number of the Dalmatian Italians. They reasserted that the only official evidence about the Dalmatian population comes from the 1857 Austro-Hungarian census, which showed that in this year there were 369,310 Slavs and 45,000 Italians in Dalmatia,[15] making Dalmatian Italians 17% of the total population of Dalmatia in the mid-19th century.
The last city with a significant Italian presence in Dalmatia was the city of Zadar (Zara). In the Habsburg empire census of 1910 the city of Zara had an Italian population of 9,318 (or 69.3% out of the total of 13,438 inhabitants). Zara population grew to 24,100 inhabitants, of which 20,300 Italians, when was in 1942 the capital of the Governatorate of Dalmatia (the "Governatorate" fulfilled the aspirations of the Italian irredentism in the Adriatic).
In 1943, Josip Broz Tito informed the Allies that Zara was a very important logistic centre for German forces in Yugoslavia. By overstating its importance, he persuaded them of its military significance. Italy surrendered in September 1943 and over the following year, specifically between 2 November 1943 and 31 October 1944, Allied Forces bombarded the town fifty-four times.
Nearly 2,000 people were buried beneath rubble; 10–12,000 people escaped and took refuge in Trieste and slightly over 1,000 reached Apulia.
Tito's partisans entered in Zara on 31 October 1944, and 138 people were killed.[16] With the Peace Treaty of 1947, Italians still living in Zara followed the Italian exodus from Dalmatia and only about 100 Dalmatian Italians now remain in the city.
After World War II, Italian Irredentism disappeared along with the defeated Fascists and the Monarchy of the House of Savoy. After Treaty of Paris (1947) and, after Treaty of Osimo (1975), all territorial claims were abandoned by the Italian State (see Foreign relations of Italy). Today, Italy, France, Malta, Greece and Slovenia are all members of the European Union, while Croatia, Montenegro and Albania are candidates for accession.
However, some Croatian and Slovenian politicians and organizations assert that some Italian politicians still propagate some irredentist ideas even in the 21st century, often causing sharp reactions from Croatian or Slovenian officials.
They often cite the then-Italian Deputy Gianfranco Fini, who in Senigallia in 2004 gave an interview to the Slobodna Dalmacija daily newspaper at the 51st gathering of the Italians who left Yugoslavia after World War II, in which he was reported to have said that "From the son of an Italian from Fiume I learned that those areas were and are Italian, but not because at any particular historical moment our army planted Italians there. This country was Venetian, and before that Roman".[17] Rather than issuing an official rebuttal of those words, Carlo Giovanardi, then Parliamentary Affairs Minister in Berlusconi's government, affirmed Fini's words, saying "...that he told the truth".[18]
These sources point out that on the 52nd gathering of the same association, in 2005, Carlo Giovanardi was quoted by the Večernji list daily newspaper as saying that Italy would launch a cultural, economic and touristic invasion in order to restore "the Italianness of Dalmatia" while participating in a roundtable discussion on the topic "Italy and Dalmatia today and tomorrow".[19] Giovanardi later declared that he had been misunderstood,[20] and sent a letter to the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he condemned nationalism and ethnic strife.[21]
They underline that Alleanza Nazionale (a former Italian conservative party, now merged in the People of Freedom party) derived directly from the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party, which often claimed that Italy paid too much for her defeat in World War II. For example, in 1994, Mirko Tremaglia, a member of the MSI and later of Alleanza Nazionale, described Rijeka, Istria and Dalmatia as "historically Italian" and referred to them as "occupied territories", saying that Italy should "tear up" the 1975 Treaty of Osimo with the former Yugoslavia and block Slovenia and Croatia's accession to EU membership until the rights of their Italian minorities are respected.[22]
In 2001, Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi gave the golden medal (for the aerial bombings endured during World War II) to the last Italian administration of Zara (today Zadar, Croatia), represented by its Gonfalone, which is currently owned by the association "Free municipality of Zara in exile". Croatian authorities complained that he was awarding a fascist institution, although the motivations for the golden medal explicitly recalled the contribution of the city to the Resistance against Fascism. The motivations were contested by several Italian right wing associations, such as the same "Free municipality of Zara in exile" and the Lega Nazionale.[23]
In February 2007 (on "Foibe Memorial Day"), Italian President Giorgio Napolitano gave a statement in which he used phrases like "one of the barbarities of the century", "movement of hate and bloodthirsty rage", "Slavic annexationist project", when speaking about the Foibe massacres.[24] The Croatian President Stjepan Mesić responded by stating that "it's impossible not to see in Napolitano's statements traces of open racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism". The European Commission asked for both sides to tone down and advised the Croatian President "not to use too sharp phrases".[25]
On December 12, 2007, the Italian post office issued a stamp with a photo of the Croatian city of Rijeka and with the text "Rijeka - eastern land once part of Italy" ("Fiume-terra orientale già italiana").[26][27] The same sources declared that the severity of this act could seen in use of prepositions and adjectives - affirming that "già italiana" could also mean "already Italian". According to Italian syntaxis the correct meaning in this case is only "previously Italian". 3.5 million copies of the stamp were printed [1] [2], but it was not delivered by the Italian Post Office in order to forestall a possible diplomatic crisis with Croatian and Slovenian authorities [3]. Nevertheless, intentionally or not, some of the stamps leaked out and came in official use.
Napolitano's statement in Feb 2008 (on "Foibe Memorial Day"), in which he reconfirmed his statements from 2007 and called Mesić's reactions from 2007 "unjustified", drew a sharp reaction from the Office of the Croatian President Stipe Mesić on 11 Feb 2008, saying that as a reaction to Napolitano's statement, there was no need to change any word from Mesić's reaction the previous year.[25][28]
Some Italian exiles believe that all these complaints made by Croatian authorities (like President Mesic) are due to the fact that there it is a growing movement in Italy (and Europe) toward asking for the official recognition of "genocide" or even democide [4] of the Italians in Istria and Dalmatia.[29]
They argue that there it is a long history of ethnic cleansing in Croatia[30] and former Yugoslavia, as reported by many academics like R.J. Rummel[31]
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