Italian irredentism

Map of the Regions claimed by the Fascists in the 1930s. In green: Nice, Ticino and Dalmatia; in red:Malta; in violet: Corsica. Savoy and Corfu were also later claimed.

Italian irredentism (Italian: irredentismo) was an Italian nationalist and Irredentist movement that aimed to complete the unification of all ethnically Italian peoples. Originally, the movement promoted the annexation by Italy of territories inhabited by an Italian majority but retained by the Austrian Empire after 1866 (hence 'unredeemed' Italy). These included the Trentino and Trieste, but even other areas with slav population such as Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca, and Dalmatia. The ideology was then extended to the city of Rijeka (Fiume), Corsica, the Ionian islands, the Mediterranean island of Malta, Nice, and Ticino.

Characteristics

Italian Irredentism was not a formal organization, it was rather an opinion movement that claimed that Italy had to reach its 'natural borders'. Similar patriotic and nationalistic ideas were common in Europe in the 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 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 XIX 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]

Place names

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.

Origins

After the Italian unification of 1861, there were areas with Italian peoples in several countries around the newly created Kingdom of Italy. The Irredentists sought to annex all those areas into a unified Italy, including some areas with a non-Italian majority. The areas targeted were Corsica, Dalmatia, Gorizia and Gradisca, the Ionian islands, Istria, Malta, Nice, Ticino, Trentino, Trieste and Rijeka (then called "Fiume").

Initially, the movement can be understood as part of a 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, and the Latin Romanians - remembered their historical traditions, revived their native tongues as literary languages, reappropriated their traditions and folklore, in short reasserted their existence as nations."^[2] The notion of a single united Italy ran counter to the aspirations of the majority populations.

19th century

Italian unification process (Risorgimento)

One of the first 'Irredentists' was 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 unification leader 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 had no wish to launch a dangerous policy of adventure against Austria, and still less to attack France for the sake of Nice and Corsica, or 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 Irridentists' 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.

World War I

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 Irridentists 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.^[3] 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."^[4]

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.^[5] Italy gained Trieste, Gorizia, Istria and the cities of Rijeka (Fiume) and Zadar (Zara). In Dalmatia, despite the Treaty of London, only Zadar with some Dalmatian islands such as Cres (Cherso), Lošinj (Lussino) and Lastovo (Lagosta) were annexed by Italy, as Woodrow Wilson, supporting Croatian claims and not recognizing the treaty, rejected Italian requests on other Dalmatian territories.

The city of Rijeka (Fiume) in the Kvarner Gulf was the subject of claim and counter-claim (see Italian Regency of Carnaro, Treaty of Rapallo, 1920 and Treaty of Rome, 1924).

The stand taken by Gabriele D'Annunzio, which briefly led him to become an enemy of the Italian state,^[6] was meant to provoke a nationalist revival through Corporatism (first instituted during his rule over Rijeka (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" the Dalmatian islands of Krk (Cherso) and Rab (Arbe) where there was a numerous Italian community.

Fascism and World War II

Fiume residents cheering D'Annunzio and his Italian Irredentism raiders, September 1919. Rijeka (Italian: Fiume) had 22,488 Italians in a total population of 35,839 inhabitants.

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.^{[citation needed]} 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)^{[citation needed]}.

Around 1939, the main territories sought included the rest of Istria, more 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.

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^[7] 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 controlled by Yugoslav Partisans. Shortly afterward these areas were occupied by the German Wehrmacht and SS forces that suppressed Tito's Partisans and found the first massacres of Italians^[8].

After 1945, many Italians were murdered in the Foibe killings and nearly 350,000 were forced to exile and move mainly to Italy,^[9] and there was a significant decline in Italian speaking populations in Istria and Dalmatia.^[10]

Dalmatia: a case of Italian Irredentism

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.^[11] Bartoli's evaluation was followed with other claims such as 25% in 1814/1815 (according to a census done by Auguste de Marmont, the French Governor General of the Napoleonic Illyrian Provinces) and, 3 years later, around 70,000 Italians in a total of 301,000 people living in Austrian Dalmatia.

Scholars like Duško Večerina assert that these evaluations were not conducted by modern scientific standards and concentrated solely on the spoken language of the population. They pointed out that, according to a report by Imperial court councilor Joseph Fölch in 1827, the Italian language was spoken by noblemen and some citizens of 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 5% of the total population, as is asserted by the Department of Historical Studies of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU).^[12]

Italian irredentists, like Gabriele D'Annunzio, claim that Joseph Fölch allegedly overlooked the Dalmatian islands of Cres (Cherso), Lošinj (Lussigno), Vis (Lissa) and others with significant Italian communities, and 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^[13], 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 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).

Then came the surrender of Italy in September 1943 and for the Italians of Zara started a terrible period of time, that made their city to be called the Italian Dresden.

In 1943 Tito, pretending the town was an important supply centre for the German divisions in Yugoslavia, persuaded the Allies of its military importance. The Anglo-Americans, between 2 November 1943 and 31 October 1944, razed it to the ground with fifty-four bombardments. As a consequence, at least 2,000 people were buried beneath the rubble, about 10-12,000 people took refuge in Trieste and slightly over one thousand reached Apulia. Tito’s partisans entered in Zara on 31 October 1944, and 138 people were shot, killed or drowned ^[14].

With the Peace Treaty of 1947, the Italians still living in Zara - no more than three thousands - were granted by Tito the opportunity to choose to become Italian citizens but with the obligation to take up residence in Italy. Actually, after WWII and the Italian exodus from Dalmatia there are only 100 Dalmatian Italians in this city.

Supposed Italian irredentism today

After World War II, Italian Irredentism officially disappeared along with the defeated Fascists and the Monarchy of the House of Savoy.

Some Croatian and Slovenian politicians and organizations (supported by some politicians from their countries) assert that Italy - in their opinion - openly propagates irredentist ideas even in the 21st century, often causing sharp reactions from Croatian and Slovenian officials.^{[citation needed]}

They often cite the then Italian Deputy Prime Minister 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" ^[15]. 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".^[16].

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 tourist invasion in order to restore "the Italianness of Dalmatia" while participating in a round table discussion on the topic "Italy and Dalmatia today and tomorrow" ^[17]. Giovanardi later declared that he had been misunderstood ^[18], and sent a letter to the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he condemned nationalism and ethnic strife ^[19].

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 , repeating that "Dalmatia was stolen from Italy"^{[citation needed]}. For example, in 1994, Mirko Tremaglia, a member of the MSI and later of Alleanza Nazionale, described Rijeka (Fiume), 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.^[20]

In 2001, Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi gave the golden medal (for the aerial bombings endured during WWII) 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^[21].

In February 2007 (on "Foibe Memorial Day"), Italian President Giorgio Napolitano gave a statement in which he used phrases like "one of the barbarhoods of the century", "movement of hate and bloodthirsty rage", "Slavic annectionist project", when speaking about the Foibe massacres^[22]. The European Commission did not comment on this event, but did comment (and partly condemn) the response by Croatian president Stjepan Mesić, when he said that "it's impossible not to see in Napolitano's statements traces of open racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism", asking for toning down and warned the Croatian President "not to use too sharp phrases".^[23]

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") ^[24][25]. The same sources declared that the severeness of this act could seen in use of prepositions and adjectives - adfirming that "già italiana" could also mean "already Italian". But according to Italian syntaxis the correct meaning in this case is only "previously Italian". The stamp was printed in 3.5 million of copies. [1] [2], but was not delivered to the public by the Italian Post Office in order to forestall a possible diplomatic crisis with Croatian and Slovenian authorities. [3]

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 as "unjustified", caused sharp reaction from the Office of the Croatian President Stipe Mesić on 11 Feb 2008, in which it was said, that as a reaction to this Napolitano's statement, there's no need to change any word from Mesić's last year's reaction.^[23][26]

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 (like has been done with the Armenian massacre done by the Turks).^[27]

They argue that there it is a long history of ethnic cleansing in Croatia ^[28] and former Yugoslavia, as reported by many academics like R.J. Rummel^[29]

Political figures in Italian Irredentism

• Guglielmo Oberdan
• Cesare Battisti
• Nazario Sauro
• Damiano Chiesa
• Fabio Filzi
• Carmelo Borg Pisani
• Giuseppe Garibaldi
• Gabriele D'Annunzio
• Petru Simone Cristofini
• Petru Giovacchini
• Maria Pasquinelli

References

Bibliography

• Bartoli, Matteo. Le parlate italiane della Venezia Giulia e della Dalmazia. Tipografia italo-orientale. Grottaferrata, 1919.
• Colonel von Haymerle, Italicae res, Vienna, 1879 - the early history of Irredentists.
• Lovrovici, don Giovanni Eleuterio. Zara dai bombardamenti all'esodo (1943-1947). Tipografia Santa Lucia - Marino. Roma, 1974.
• Petacco, Arrigo. A tragedy revealed: the story of Italians from Istria, Dalmatia, Venezia Giulia (1943-1953). University of Toronto Press. Toronto, 1998
• Večerina, Duško. Talijanski Iredentizam ( Italian Irredentism ), ISBN 953-98456-0-2, Zagreb, 2001
• Vivante, Angelo. Irredentismo adriatico (The Adriatic Irredentism), 1984

External links

• Articles on the History of Dalmatia
• Articles on the Italians in Dalmatia
• Articles on Zara (Zadar), when was a city of the Kingdom of Italy.
• Slovene - Italian relations between 1880-1918
• Irredentists
• (Italian)Website of the Italian irredentism
• (Croatian)Hrvati AMAC Gdje su granice (EU-)talijanskog bezobrazluka? (Where are the limits of Italian arrogancy?; page contains the speech of Italian deputy)
• (Croatian)Hrvati AMAC 'Božićni darovi' poniženoj Hrvatskoj (Christmas gifts to humiliated Croatia; page contains the scan of the stamp)
• (Croatian)Slobodna Dalmacija Počasni građanin Zadra kočnica talijanskoj ratifikaciji SSP-a
• (Italian)D'Annunzio and Fiume
• (Italian)Politicamentecorretto.com Onorevole Guglielmo Picchi Forza Italia
• (Italian)Italia chiama Italia Francobollo Fiume: bloccata l'emissione
• (Italian)Trieste.rvnet.eu Stoppato” il francobollo per Fiume, bufera: protestano Unione degli istriani, An e Forza Italia (contains the scan of the stamp)
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

See also

• Irredentism
• Italians
• Italian Regency of Carnaro
• Italian Unification
• History of Italy as a monarchy and in the World Wars
• Italian Empire
• Manifest Destiny
• Istrian exodus

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