Although today used to describe any movement to claim back territory for ethnic, linguistic, geographical or historical reasons, the term irredentism originally came from the Italian nationalist movement Italia irredenta. Meaning “unredeemed Italy”, Italian irredentism was an opinion movement rather than a formal organisation. It sought to unify ethnically Italian territories, such as Trieste, Trentina, and Istria, that were outside of Italian borders at the time of the unification of Italy in 1866. The annexation of these Italian territories from Austria provided Italy with its strongest motive for participating in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 satisfied most of Italy’s irredentist claims, however new borders delineated by the treaty gave rise to new irredentist claims. Dividing the German Empire into separate nations created German minority populations in the new countries of Poland and Hungary. German irredentist claims to these territories, as well as to Austria, resulted in the Second World War. The Treaty of Versailles created Yugoslavia to be a Slavic homeland, but ethnic and religious differences between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats eventually led to war in the 1990s. The artificial political states created by the Treaty of Versailles in East Africa failed to take tribal boundaries into account, and thus remain subject to irredentist claims. Similarly, borders drawn up in the Near East are still contentious today.