A PS on irredentism britannica.com/topic/irredent…
Irredentism traces back to an Italian word meaning "unredeemed" - places and territories coveted by Italian nationalists even after they assembled their state in the 1850s and 1860s. 1/x
Irredentism is now used to describe the ambition of governments to hack off and annex pieces of neighboring territory - as the Hungarian far right wants to do not only to Ukraine, but also to Romania and other neighbors. 2/x
My family and I went skiing earlier this month in one of the places classically described as "irredenta": the South Tyrol, formerly German-speaking and Habsburg-ruled, but since 1919, annexed to Italy. 3/x
So much blood was spilled for the South Tyrol in the First World War, some of the most terrible battles of that ghastly conflict. 4/x basicbooks.com/titles/mark-th… 
Even now, you can still see the explosive scars and concrete bunkers left behind by that war, now carefully curated among the chair lifts, restaurants, and quaint chalets of a tranquil vacation land. 5/x
And as you ride the chair lifts, you discover you are surrounded by Austrians and Slovenes and others whose great-grandparents fought on the other side of the terrible battles of 1915-1918. And ... they're not mad! They ski and eat! If they want a house, they buy one! 6/x
Which they can easily do, because today Italy, Austria, and Slovenia are bound together in the European Union. There's no need to fight any more over which national government delivers the mail and ploughs the snow in the South Tyrol. 7/x
You want to call it Bolzan as you drive from Munich or Vienna? Go ahead. Prefer Bolzano when you program the GPS in Milan or Rome? Also fine. 8/x
There are no perfect solutions to anything in this imperfect world. No doubt there are many dissatisfactions invisible to a tourist who speaks neither German, nor Slovene, nor Italian, nor the local language known as Ladin. But ... it works well enough. 9/x
And the same way of doing things could and should work well enough to soothe the hurts left behind by the Treaty of Trianon. Instead of fretting where to draw the border between Hungary and Romania - just make the border matter less. 10/x
Both Hungary and Romania - ditto the other states except Ukraine that hold former Hungarian territories - could be borderless neighbors, governed by the same cheerful accommodation in South Tyrol, or Alsace-Lorraine, or Schleswig-Holstein, or other former slaughterhouses 11/x
... former slaughterhouses now zones of peace, where former grievances now provide matter for high-school history exams, forgotten as soon as the students enter the real world of post-national multilingual democratic free-trade Europe. 12/x
When the Hungarian far right demonizes the EU - and through its credulous American fellow-travelers spreads that demonization into American conservative politics - they are not only undermining this work of peace ... 13/x
... but also dooming their own hopes to make Hungary great again in the only way possible: not through territorial aggrandizement by violence, but through cultural enlargement under a larger framework that blurs the borders between qualified member states. 14/x
Yes it's often tedious, obscure, dull, and grindingly bureaucratic. It's also one of the most beautiful things our human race has ever done. Especially when you remember the alternatives in which so many young men so horribly suffered and so uselessly perished ... 15/x
... on slopes where their great-grandchildren play and party in peace and freedom with the great-grandchildren of former mortal enemies. END
... Bozen, sorry, I am corrected by German-speakers
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