Italy), a slogan for the return to Italian control of lands they thought of as
naturally Italian and lost to Italian rule by the past aggression of their
neighbours. Parts of Austria, for example, had once been Italian states, as
had Nice and parts of south-eastern France, and in the new spirit of Italian
unity the demand for the integration of the whole Italian linguistic region was
politically emotive (seelanguage groups). The Italian movement collapsed
after Italy was forced into an alliance, in 1881, with two of its previous
enemies, Germany and Austria, but it gave its name to any similar situation
where the return to their rightful home of long-lost lands becomes a rallying
cry. The French policy ofrevanche, the retaking of the territories of Alsace and
Lorraine lost in the Franco–Prussian war, which was so vital a force in French
politics during the early Third Republic, could be described as ‘irredentist’, as
could Hitler’s demands for the Third Reich to control German-speaking
Czechoslovakia, or, for that matter any long-standing territorial claims based
on a largely linguistic claim to national sovereignty. With the collapse of
communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 1989 onwards,
there was a danger of rampant irredentism taking hold, as it was largely only
Soviet domination that had preserved stability in a region with few clearly-
defined linguistic boundaries.
Islam
Islam is the religion of the followers of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632),
who are usually called Muslims, but it also has a geographical application. The
Islamic world is very large and expanding: a 2001 estimate put it at perhaps
1,200 million people, containing Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indo-Pakistanis,
Indonesia-Malayans, West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans spread, of course,
over even more political frontiers. Theoretically there is no divide between the
Islamic state and faith, because, according to Islam, the state is a religious
institution, guided by the Prophet’s words in the Koran, and is expected to
legislate by the moral and practical precepts therein. Indeed, rather more than
Christianity, Islam is a complete socio-economic and political theory,
although, naturally, much developed and modified over the centuries. One
example of this is in economics, where there is a strong belief in equality which
leads, in theory at least, to the forbidding of usury (a doctrine the Roman
Catholic church gave up even in theory in the Middle Ages). Another is that
the theoretical equality of all Muslims (or at least all Muslim men) has
prevented anything like the creation of an e ́lite of institutionalized clergy;
while individual spiritual leaders (seeayatollahs) have held great power, they
have done so on the basis of their own talents, reputation or, inWeber’sover-
used phrase, for once properly relevant,charisma.
Islam