Irredentism - Other Irredentism

Other Irredentism

Until the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland in 1998 the Irish Republic claimed the territory of six counties that form Northern Ireland. Spain claims the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, ceded to Britain in perpetuity in 1713 under the Treaty of Utrecht, and argues its case at the United Nations claiming its territorial integrity is affected. During World War II, the Spanish Falangist media agitated for irredentism claiming for Spain the French Navarre, French Basque Country and Roussillon (French Catalonia) as well. Morocco makes similar claims against Spain over the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Portugal does not recognize as Spanish the territory of Olivenza conquered by Spain during the Napoleonic Wars.

Some of the most violent irredentist conflicts of recent times in Europe flared up as a consequence of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were largely about creating a new political framework of states, each of which would be ethnically and politically homogeneous. The conflict erupted further south with the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo seeking to switch allegiance to the adjoining state of Albania. Greece claims that the use of the name Republic of Macedonia by its northern neighbor signifies an irredentist claim on the northern province of Macedonia in Greece.

South Asia too is another region in which armed irredentist movements have been active for almost a century, due to the Balkanization of North-East India, Burma and Bangladesh under British colonialism. Most prominent amongst them are the Naga fight for Greater Nagaland, the Chin struggle for a unified Chinland and other self-determinist movements by the ethnic indigenous peoples of the erstwhile Assam both under the British and post-British Assam under India.

Irredentism is acute in the Caucasus region, too. The Nagorno-Karabakh movement’s original slogan of miatsum (‘union’) was explicitly oriented towards unification with Armenia, feeding an Azerbaijani understanding of the conflict as a bilateral one between itself and an irredentist Armenia. According to Prof. Thomas Ambrosio, "Armenia's successful irredentist project in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan" and "From 1992 to the cease-fire in 1994, Armenia encountered a highly permissive or tolerant international environment that allowed its annexation of some 15 percent of Azerbaijani territory". In the view of Nadia Milanova, Nagorno-Karabakh represents a combination of separatism and irredentism.

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which operates in Lebanon and Syria, works for the unification of most modern states of the Levant and beyond in a single state referred to as Greater Syria. The proposed Syrian country includes Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait; and southern Turkey, northern Egypt, and southwestern Iran.

Japan claims the Russian-administered Kuril Islands, the four southernmost isles of the island chain north of Hokkaido, annexed by the Soviet Union following World War II.

The 1909 Gando Convention addressed a territory dispute between China and Joseon Korea in China's favor. Both Korean states now accept the convention border as an administrative boundary. However, because the convention was made by the occupying Empire of Japan, South Korea has disputed its legality and some Koreans claim that Korea extends into de facto PRC territory. The most ambitious claims include all parts of Manchuria that the Goguryeo kingdom controlled. Both Korean states claim the Liancourt Rocks, which Japan annexed while Korea was a Japanese protectorate.

Irredentism is commonplace in Africa due to the political boundaries of former European colonial nation-states passing through tribal boundaries, and recent declarations of independence after civil war. For example, some Ethiopian nationalist circles still claim the former Ethiopian province of Eritrea (internationally recognized as the independent State of Eritrea in 1993 after a 30 year civil war). Ogaden in eastern Ethiopia has seen a movement seeking to make it part of Somalia.