RU SSIA A N D U K R A IN E RUSSI A A ND UKRAINE
Lands of the Lost Modern history teems with irredentism—a bloody march of messiahs and autocrats trying to “reclaim” lost lands. Where will Putin’s forces halt?
By Victor Davis Hanson
I
rredentism—the romance of reclaiming “unredeemed” old lands—is a symptom of messianic presidents and premiers, and national paranoia and insecurity. Leaders demagogue about the recovery of ancient territories whose departures are said to have weakened the nation’s
imperial grandeur and power. Supposedly long-scattered and oppressed peoples with common linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities are recombined—usually by violently overthrowing their contemporary governments and forcing them into a new ethnic superstate. Yet irredentism is often a one-way street. Supposedly homeless expatriates—the Greeks of Constantinople, Italians in Malta, Germans in the Sudetenland, Serbs in Bosnia, and Russians in Ukraine—are said to be even more zealous nationalists than their kindred in the motherland. But just as often the territory to be reunited in a grand imperial scheme is more reluctant than the would-be uniter. Early twentieth-century Greek romantics fancied resurrecting the old “Great Idea,” the dreamy re-creation of a panhellenic Eastern Mediterranean. The New Byzantium was to be ringed by Greek-speakers in the motherland, Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, Cyprus, and northern Egypt. Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the chair of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict, and a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project and its National Security Task Force. H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2022
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