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Archive 1Archive 2

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Palestine?

Is this a joke? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.194.63.222 (talk) 22:09, 6 December 2009 (UTC)


The discussion of Israel in this context is fascinating because, as I'm sure is often the case, one person's irredentism is someone else's historical right! Those sympathetic to the Zionist movement and State of Israel would not see their point of view as irredentist, and conversely, they would view the coveting of their homeland by Palestinians as irredentist. In all fairness, I would have to conclude that there are problems with the application of this concept to this particular case from either side of the argument. On the other hand, the view held by some (so-called right-wing) Israelis, that land beyond the recognized borders of the State of Israel by right should also be (or become) part of the State of Israel, can properly be termed irredentist without doing violence to the concept or to the ideology of these Israeli citizens. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.116.118.100 (talk) 13:22, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Regardless, I think it is misleading to put Israel in the section of official irredentism. The occupation of a former Jewish homeland by Israelis has never been enshrined in Israel legally or constitutionally. Irredentism implies the claim over territory that does not currently belong to you. Yes, East Jerusalem was annexed after the 67 war, that's annexation, not irredentism. West Bank is not claimed in Israeli law. So there are many Israelis who do claim it... so put it in the "other irredentism". MosheEmes (talk) 17:32, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

surely Israel is the exemplar case? the whole foundation was about a disparate nation going its home land? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.41.41.184 (talk) 23:29, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Argentina

Is Argentina an example irredentism? its a territorial claim based on practicality for the most part, the Falklands are closer to Argentina than the UK. I don't think anyone is claiming them as a lost homeland, particularly since Argentina itself is a colony nation, so it's national homeland would be Spain. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.41.41.184 (talk) 23:33, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

That Alaska Section

"Alaska

Since late June of 2015 a new Facebook group known as the Alaskan irredentists has appeared. The group seeks to organize a petition drive in Alaska to withdraw Alaska's January 3 1959 ratification of the Constitution of the United States and begin talks with Canada to join Alaska to Canada, either as a new province of Canada or perhaps under a special free association agreement between Alaska and Canada. The group maintains that the United States is soon going to break up into smaller countries, in the same way that the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia broke up into smaller countries, but nonetheless independence for Alaska would be "quite impractical" and therefore joining with Canada would be Alaska's only real choice. The group has attracted much enthusiastic support from both it's Alaskan and Canadian members."


Nope, no advertising for a minute special interest group searching for publicity at all. Completely unbiased reporting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.234.33.67 (talk) 15:51, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Irredentism

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Irredentism's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Barrington2006":

  • From Somalia: Schraeder 2006, p. 115
  • From Somalis: Barrington, Lowell, After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States, (University of Michigan Press: 2006), p.115

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT 21:12, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

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Iraq/Kuwait

Another one! Actually the historical parallels are interesting, both Syria and Iraq were partitioned by their colonial occupiers (France and the UK respectively) so that the choice bit could be kept as a puppet state of sorts. 82.170.18.218 17:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC) Interesting in that the League of Nation Mandate System was considered "Colonialist". Of the 26 Mandates, they were all agreed to by the Member Nations, most of which were not colonialist powers. Shadowstands (talk) 20:16, 8 May 2016 (UTC)[1]

References

  1. ^ San Remo Accords

Please check painting

Is the picture of the school children taken from an original painted in 1887 or a modern fake painted in 1977? Andrew Swallow (talk) 13:25, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Muslim declaration of War

On 23 January 2017 several paragraphs were added by User:Rajmaan then removed that started

Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for "jihad to liberate every span of land of the Muslims that has been usurped and violated, from Kashgar to Andalusia, and from the Caucasus to Somalia and Central Africa".[1]

This was reporting a declaration of war made on 13 August 2015. It is relevant to Irredentism because a Muslim is trying to regain land that previous Muslims have stolen but were unable to keep. Attacks on civilians in Europe using truck bombs and using snipers in North Africa suggest this may be real. Andrew Swallow (talk) 01:42, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Al-Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad (13 August 2015). "Ayman al-Zawahiri's Pledge of Allegiance to New Taliban Leader Mullah Muhammad Mansour".

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Kurdistan section should be removed

Kurdish nationalism is separatist rather than irredentist in nature, as, at present, no Kurdish state exists. Even the section in this article concerns an independence movement: "Kurds have often used the ancient entity of Corduene as evidence that they should have a state separate from the countries where they are now a minority." Therefore, I think the Kurdistan section does not belong on this article. If a Kurdish state is established sometime in the future, a section in this article would make sense as this state would mostly likely aim to incorporate the whole Kurdish homeland, rather than just the individual Kurdish region of present-day Iraq/Syria/Turkey/Iran.Last edited by: (talk) 01:58, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Hawaiian sovereignty movement

Has modern notable activity, for example Sai v. Obama et al: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2010cv00899/142427/

67.180.88.136 (talk) 02:49, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

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Too many tags

It seems to me that there are too many "This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (December 2015) tags. This page is a general page, and most paragraphs have a link to a main page. No doubt wiki-editors will add stuff when they feel up to it, but having so many tags makes the page look unnecessarily scrappy, and I propose to remove them. Any objections? Arrivisto (talk) 14:50, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

English claim on France

htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_throne#Ending_the_claim — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cobalt69 (talkcontribs) 12:18, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Jerusalem and the USA

Article currently reads in part by May 2018 the embassy will have officially moved to Jerusalem. That's obviously in need of an update! Andrewa (talk) 05:37, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

South Sudan

It's curious that South Sudan is not in the list. Does Sudan not care about losing the territory or does it not count for some reason? 🤔 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.195.67.142 (talk) 21:56, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Irredentism

Is it possible to instead on it being a Current Irredentism example section, that it be labeled "Current Irredentism Claims" I think that removing examples of claims to Irredentism, removes the chance for people to see injustices in the world under false pretenses — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.70.186.162 (talk) 16:52, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Forgive my ignorance, but is this a word which had a history of usage, or is this a recent invention ? If it is the latter, then a word or two about the words origin is needed. At the risk of being a bore, I am of the opinion that too many articles contain uneccessary levels of jargon and therefore keep this encyclopedia from being relatively accessable and understandable to all - for example, the usage of "warfighting" demonstrates this. (anon.)

In response I made the connection to Italia irredenta even more obvious in the article. --Wetman 15:36, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
That's all good and well, but I think that the reader is given an extraordinarily pedagogical explanation with many useful links to origin, meaning and usage in relevant contexts. I'm not sure what "warfighting" means, it sounds like a pleonasm, but if there is such a word and if journalists, achademics, diplomats or your uncle's hairdresser uses it, then the word clearly merits an entry in an ecyclipedia and/or a dictionary so that curious people like ourselves (Wikipedians) can go and look it up. --Big Adamsky 16:14, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Split discussion

The article contains a tag suggesting that the individual regional examples of irredentism be split into their own article, but it doesn't look like anyone ever actually started a discussion for it; it seems like a good idea to me, so I'm starting one now. We need an article discussing more general scholarship on irredentism as a phenomenon, and currently the giant list is sort of making that difficult. I feel like it bloated far beyond what it needs to be because virtually every claim on the list is controversial. Also, what's with the division between "Ongoing irredentist claims in the world" and "Other irredentism"? The "other" category seems to have a lot of ongoing claims and, either way, should probably also be spun off, either into the same article or a different one. Perhaps we could have a formally-defined list of historical irredentist claims (ie. ones that nobody is actively pursuing or which have been rendered moot in one way or another), but the problem is that the nature of irredentism means that it tends to die hard. --Aquillion (talk) 05:23, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

@Aquillion:. I appreciate your assessment of this article and I agree it probably needs more generalization with better scholarship. And splitting off the individual claims by various nations into separate articles seems like a really good idea. I would like to help out if I have the time going forward. Feel free to take the lead on this and I'll do what I can. Hopefully other editors will join in. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 06:05, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
@Aquillion:. This is definitely overdue. Go for it! Muttnick (talk) 18:39, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
Because many cases are hardly distinguishable I don't think it reasonable to separate chapter "Ongoing..." from chapter "Other ...", as placing of a template below "Ongoing..." would suggest. Don't mind moving both chapters, but don't see any urgency either. Darwwin (talk) 09:59, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Estonia and claim to Ivangorod

In recent months the Estonian government demanded Russia return the Estonia border to the 1920 border. This is an example of irredentism.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/11/20/estonia-demands-annexed-territory-back-from-russia-a68241

--204.197.178.125 (talk) 02:04, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Palestine

I removed reference to Palestine. This is because there is absolutely nothing to back up the claim and it has been sitting thefe forever. And although i'm not interested in getting into a POV arguement, labeling Palestine as 'stolen jewish land' and nothing more (literally...nothing more) is just completely dishonest. The best thing to do was simply remove the tiny snippet. I don't think we'll question any value lost in this article...perhaps we just gained some value. As the Palestinian identity can only be applied to the descendants of the East Roman Empire Christians, given the renaming of the occupied Roman Client State of Judea, as "Palestine", and it's Capitol City, Jerusalem as "Aelia Capitolina" the Arab Groups who adopted this identity during the 1960'sre claiming a Nation-State called "Palestine" exists, when in fact, historically there has never been a Nation State called "Palestine". To use this word to describe "irredentism" is very strange. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shadowstands (talkcontribs) 20:23, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Fuck you, Adolf. 2607:FEA8:BFA0:BD0:7409:918E:B050:8D44 (talk) 12:07, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Clear out and redirect of the article

This article has gone off course and needs some major edit work. I have changed the lead to what I think is a better definition than what was there, and to one that will allow us to pin down examples of irredentism more precisely. If anybody disagrees or has other ideas please come here first. My view is that we should stick only to state govt irredentist claims or non-state govt claims that form a significant movement within a state. That will get rid of all the fringe ideas. We also need to separate irredentist policies from simple expansionist policies, which are usually related but not quite the same thing. Sorting this article out will take a while though. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 19:32, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Lead sentence

We should not start an article with "X is defined as", but rather say what X is, giving a few definitions, especially in this case where the definition is a bit unclear. See the book "Irredentism in European Politics: Argumentation, Compromise and Norms." for a few examples of the various definitions that can be given. The opening definitely needs more work, and I'll keep working on it along with other editors for a while. --Slashme (talk) 11:14, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, restored to the last longstanding stable version, reasoning in the edit log...(KIENGIR (talk) 13:20, 24 February 2020 (UTC))
The lead is open to improvement like the rest of the article. I used a dictionary definition because it avoided personal interpretation of the meaning. With a concept as loosely defined as irredentism this would be a problem. As I began edit changes to the est of the article I began thinking that a better way forward would be to remove the long lists of various claims - the article here deals with the various claims so this article is doubling up to an extent - and instead this article should focus on the concept itself, its history and use in academic circles. However, that seems vacuous and lacking any sort of focal point. An alternative would be to merge the list article with this article. (The list article needs improving as well). I am open to ideas. Thanks all for contributing so far. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 18:31, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
I had no problem with your solution, but Slashme.(KIENGIR (talk) 07:16, 26 February 2020 (UTC))

Remove Sri Lanka?

the section seems to refer to internal religious tensions not claims of lost territory, so I feel like it would fit better elsewhere --jonas (talk) 15:41, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

That is not correct. It is related to a claim of lost land, namely lands which were once mainly populated by Sinhalese Buddhists and contain multiple ancient Sinhala Buddhist archaeological sites, in an region which is now mainly populated by Tamil non-Buddhists. Irredentism is what is driving the current land grabs in these Tamil majority areas.Oz346 (talk) 19:41, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Add Sweden

Some Swedish irredintists exist, who claim Åland or all of Finland. Could someone please add this, I am to lazy to do it myself. 188.151.55.33 (talk) 14:44, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Try being less lazy and sign up while you are about it. Don't forget your references either. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 14:58, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@Roger8Roger, please don't restore this segment when I delete it. There are several reasons why I do so. You call this "disruptive editing", and I could not disagree more. Here are my reasons. 1. Discussion finished. I've added what's been talked about, so there's no need for it to be kept up. 2. It's badly worded. It's bad and shameful to use the word "lazy" as I've made several contributions, and so maybe the right wording would be: I don't feel like doing it myself. And even then, I didn't even need to make this section, since I could have just edited it in later. I wrote the message as if this page would have been protected, which it isn't. 3. It's unnecessary. As I said in reason 2, if I didn't want to add what we discussed, I could have just added it later instead of adding this section. 4. I don't want to keep this up. Combining the reasons above, I simply don't want this section to be up anymore, and I think that since I'm the one who added this section, I also think I'm entitled to remove it. So therefore Roger, I would like you to not intervene when I remove Add Sweden from Talk:Irredentism. Please reply, because I don't get why anyone would like this monstrosity of a section be kept up on a talk page. 188.151.55.33 (talk) 15:13, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

WCM, I am not so sure there has been an real irredentist claim to the Aland Islands by Sweden, if anything a half-hearted claim. The issue seems to be more the islanders' wish for self-determination and if that was not possible a link with Sweden rather than Finland or Russia. The fact they were/are ethnically Swedish is a side issue - plenty of Swedes in Finland and, then, Estonia with no irredentist claim by Sweden. I am no expert on this topic though. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 09:08, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Claimed by who? / Suggestions for criteria for inclusion

Copied here continued discussion based on on @Roger 8 Roger's suggestion

This article would improve if it was structured a bit more like List of active separatist movements in Europe. In particular there are a lot of claims without any information on who make the claim. I would suggest the following criteria for claims making the lists:

  • Actor/claimant
    • To make the list for 'Official or major disputes' - The government of a country currently claim the territory
    • To make the list for 'Unofficial or minor disputes in Europe' - A party with representation at national, regional or local level
  • The claim must be current
  • The territory must have a (real or imagined) past that is different from its current status.

Examples:

  • Actor/claimant - It is hard to tell without sources, but many of the listings under 'Unofficial or minor disputes in Europe' seems very obscure. It is not helpful for the reader to list everything anyone has ever suggested should belong to another country. The should be some cut-off mark to clarify how politically important the claim is.
  • The claim must be current - Most Scandinavian items on the list seems to just reflect areas that at some point belonged to another country and not relate to anything current.
  • The territory must have a (real or imagined) past that is different from its current status - If that is not the case it is just a border dispute. Rockall is listed quite frequently, but no actor claims that their state or people have ruled over Rockall or anything such - it is just a border dispute (for the seabed rather than the < 1000 m2 land)

For the claimant I would suggest adding a column to the 'unofficial or minor disputes' where the claimant(s) is/are listed. I would also suggest that the first table for each continent is just called 'official disputes' to make it more clear. (I will make those changes if no-one objects) Gunnar Larsson (talk) 21:31, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

@Gunnar Larsson I sort of agree with what you are saying. Please see the talk page on the main article Irredentism where this problem, and here [1] was raised by me. (Have a look through if I am not providing a clear link here). My view is that we should have the debate on what to do on the main page rather than this list page. The main page is effectively a list anyway, so the problem of having two articles saying the same thing also needs to be sorted. I had rearranged the headings on the main page to better reflect my opinion of reality and simplicity, which correspond reasonably well with your views here. Since then not much has happened on the main page, but now might be a good time to resurrect the debate. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 02:41, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
The list on the main page is of much higher quality, great work! It might be too drastic, but I would suggest 1) replacing the current List of irredentist claims or disputes with the list on this page (appending it where the current list contains useful information), 2) Remove current headers 2-5 from this site, but make the link to List of irredentist claims or disputes more prominent, by writing a paragraph about it or so 3) add a criteria section to the list page , like the one I suggested (or an improvement of it) and 4) add a Demand supported by text section in a similar way as the current 'Main article'/'See also' links at the top for each claim. Gunnar Larsson (talk) 13:32, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

According to the Geneva Accord, A Model Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, irrendetism and terrorism are placed together as something that should require laws to precent incitement. "Without prejudice to freedom of expression and other internationally recognized human rights, Israel and Palestine shall promulgate laws to prevent incitement to irredentism, racism, terrorism and violence and vigorously enforce them." What do you think? Shall we add this point to the article? I find it quite peculiar and interesting but maybe too marginal.

I am sure about, Discrète we see a parallel to Peacefull Etnic Groups and Moslem posesed History about changing the World, Religion FREESPIRIT4407 (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Proposed merge with revanchism

Two articles covering exactly the same ground... except each having a short disclaimer inconsistently claiming that the other term has some other meaning. So have an unfortunate combination of redundancy (in claimed scope), and (I assume inadvertent) POV fork over the respective definitions of the words. Better to have a single article, and a more unified such discussion. 109.255.211.6 (talk) 01:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

The meanings of the terms are similar but not identical. The main difference is that irredentism has a positive goal of building an (ethnically) unified nation state while revanchism has a negative goal of taking revenge for a previous grievance. See the section "Revanchism" or the sources Wittmann 2016 and Ghervas 2021 for more details. In some cases, both phenomena may arise together but not in other cases. In this regard, this is not a POV fork. If the differences are not properly reflected in the articles then the proper way to fix this would be to adjust their contents correspondingly. Phlsph7 (talk) 18:05, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

problem with recent major changes

Irredentism is usually understood as a claim by one state on a territory of a neighboring state. Two errors here. (1) It doesn't have to be a claim by a state. It could be a claim by a political movement or ideology, or it could be a claim by a displaced ethnic group for a territory they believe to be rightfully theirs. (2) One can expect that most commonly the desired territory is neighboring, but it isn't an essential part of the definition. It could be an overseas territory, for example. Zerotalk 03:52, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The word "usually" deals with your concerns. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 04:56, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
No it doesn't. Irredentist political movements are way more common than irredentist state policies. Zerotalk 05:30, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Hello Zero0000 and thanks for addressing this issue. You are right that this characterization does not cover irredentism in the widest sense. The difficulty in this regard is that there are many disagreements about the precise definition. They are mentioned later in the paragraph and in more detail in the section "Definition". My idea was to use a common and relatively simple characterization for the first sentence and not drop all the difficulties on the reader right away. I had hoped that the phrase "usually understood as" should take care of it, as Roger 8 Roger has pointed out. Social movements usually demand that their state lays claim to territories belonging to another state. In this regard, it is not so different since it may be seen as a demand to defend "a claim by one state on a territory of a neighboring state".
Here are some definitions by a few of the sources cited:
  • Kornprobst 2008: Most scholars use the term irredentism to describe a territorial claim of one state against another.
  • Griffiths 2008: Irredentism can be defined as a territorial claim made by one state to areas under the sovereign authority of another state.
  • White, Millett 2019: Irredentism The desire to annex adjacent land to a state because it historically belonged to the potential annexing state or because it contains people who are culturally akin to those in the potential annexing state.
Would the following suggestion solve your concerns: "Irredentism is usually understood as a desire that one state annexes a territory of a neighboring state. This desire is motivated...." ? Since it is not mentioned whose desire it is, it should apply equally to desires by government and by social movements. We could also drop the "neighboring", but this is the most common case. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Ok, let's go with that. Not sure it is perfect. It's clear that there is a variety of opinion about the definition. One question is whether we should stick to "the" meaning in international law, or start with a more general meaning. Kornprobst has a whole page about different definitions, but there is a commonality that the motivation/justification is key. Merely to covet more territory is not irredentism. More definitions: Oxford English Dictionary—"any policy of seeking the recovery and reunion to one country of a region or regions for the time being subject to another country". Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law (Oxford)—"The concept of irredentism describes a political and ideological movement aiming at unifying the nation by reclaiming lost populations and territories." Both highlight the recovery aspect. I'd prefer the lead sentence to mention motivation but I don't have a suggestion right now. Zerotalk 11:41, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Initially, I wanted to end the first sentence with the phrase "based on ethnic or historical reasons". I decided to leave it out because it becomes too repetitive since this is already explained in the next sentence. Another option would be to combine the first 2 sentences into 1 sentence: "Irredentism is usually understood as a desire that one state annexes a territory of a neighboring state based on ethnic reasons (because the population of the territory is ethnically similar to the population of the parent state) or on historic reasons (because the territory formed part of the parent state before)." The disadvantage here is that this sentence is very long. I think in its current form with 2 sentences, it's more accessible and it should be clear to the reader that motivation is a key aspect. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:42, 10 December 2022 (UTC)