IRREDENTISM. - Irredentism, an almost exclusively Italian phenomenon, was, more than a doctrine, a political movement animated predominantly by sentimental motives and surrounded by a certain mystical aura, expressed even in the word itself, derived from the hypothetical existence of a servitude still in need of redemption. As in every other movement, so also in this one an ideological substratum can be found, and this derives from the nationalist conception of the Risorgimento, to which it is linked.
With the application of the principle of nationality (v.), the conclusion was then reached that all the fractions of the Italian people, speaking the same language and having the same culture, ought to be united under the same national political regime, so as to achieve the natural coincidence between nationality and the State. Once the goal had been largely attained, through the establishment of the unitary Italian State under the House of Savoy, the principle continued to influence minds and led them to consider the work of redemption as not yet entirely complete, since certain provinces had remained under a foreign yoke.
Two classical concepts of nationalism may therefore be regarded as the ideal driving forces of the irredentist movement: on the one hand, the right of those fractions of a nationality that had remained outside the orbit of the national State to join with the already unified majority; on the other, the injustice of their subjection to a foreign State, whence there was then deduced, for the nationality, the faculty of rising up against the State to which it had remained subject, and, for the national State, that of moving to its liberation or redemption from foreign servitude.
This sum of principles and conclusions, although it was not framed within an organic doctrine, is subject to the criticism directed against the principle of nationality, which cannot by itself establish the right it asserts, nor is it suited to making it possible to qualify as unjust the political subjection of a part of the nation to a power of a different nationality. If, moreover, the principles implied by irredentism have no moral and juridical value, then no value attaches either to the conclusion deduced from them concerning the faculty of rising up against the State, in order to obtain independence, and of moving by war to the redemption of the nationality. Catholic doctrine, respectful of the acquired rights of the State and of the duties of subjection of the alien minorities living within it, has constantly excluded from the just causes of war the liberation of nationalities, and from the motives of legitimate resistance to constituted powers the mere desire for independence or national unity. The picture of the conclusions could nevertheless change should the State set itself up as oppressor and tyrant of the nationality, in the attempt to level it and violently absorb it into the majority, preventing it from maintaining and developing its own peculiarities and its own culture.
Historically, irredentism began in Italy just after the annexation of Venetia. On the occasion of Victor Emmanuel II's journey to Udine, in 1866, a great number of people from Gorizia and the surrounding region, who had remained under Austrian rule, organized a great demonstration of Italian identity, while at the same time in Trentino the agitations for independence were beginning. Its character, more sentimental than theoretical, is manifested by the fact that the irredentist claims were directed exclusively toward certain border territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and among these preferably toward Trentino and Venezia Giulia, with an illogical forgetting of Dalmatia, although it too was considered to be of Italian culture, and still more of the provinces subjected, on the other side of the Alps, to French rule, Savoy and the Island of Corsica.
Irredentism was eminently anti-Austrian and acted in the various phases of history as a stimulus to the national idea, now suppressed by governments eager to avoid international complications in certain periods of internal consolidation, now exploited as an agitational idea. At the moment of the entry into war against Austria, on the occasion of the First World War, irredentism had a great influence in stirring minds, particularly among the youthful element of the universities, together with the reborn nationalism with which it had practically merged in a community of ideals.
Political errors committed by Austria and certain victims reaped by repression, as in 1880 with Oberdan, rekindled it within and beyond the national borders, facilitating the action of certain associations founded for this purpose. Among them, although it set itself cultural aims, the "Dante Alighieri" deserves particular mention. The favorable outcome of the First World War, with the collapse of the Austrian Empire, removed the bait from the movement, which saw the unitary goals for which it had fought attained.