Dissident Voices 281“there will be harmony and brotherhood.” As with so many idealists,
militant imagery came readily to him. “Humanity,” Mazzini grandly
proclaimed,is a great army moving to the conquest of unknown lands, against pow-
erful and wary enemies. Th e Peoples are the diff erent corps and divisions
of that army. Each has a post entrusted to it; each a special operation to
perform; and the common victory depends on the exactness with which
the diff erent operations are carried out.In the sphere of international law, these ideas were most prominently cham-
pioned by a fellow Italian of Mazzini’s named Pasquale Mancini. He was
originally from Sicily. As a committed po liti cal liberal, he served in the
postrevolutionary government of Naples in 1848. When the Bourbon mon-
archy regained power, however, he was forced to fl ee to Piedmont. Th e re-
stored Naples government then proceeded to seize his property. In 1851,
he was appointed to the newly established chair of international law at the
University of Turin. His inaugural address, delivered that year, was the
principal statement of the nationality thesis. It was entitled “Nationality as
the Foundation of the Law of Nations.” Later that year, the Austrian am-
bassador to Sardinia- Piedmont attempted to stop Mancini from lecturing,
but the prime minister of the country supported him.
Mancini defi ned nationality as “a natural society of men whom unity of
territory, origin, customs, and language molds into a community of living
and of national consciousness.” Th is was the natural and fundamental
unit of human social life in his eyes. Th e state was a sort of secondary ema-
nation of the nation. In the defi nition that he made famous, the state was
“the juridical arrangement of the nation.” His nationalism, like that of
Mazzini, was cosmopolitan, in that he saw nations not as isolated, inward-
looking entities, but instead as components of a larger global society. “Just as
individuals should be or ga nized as nations,” he maintained, “so all human-
ity must be or ga nized in an international society, based upon the coexis-
tence and reciprocal in de pen dence of all the nations under the universal
rule of justice.” Strangely, although the ideas of Mazzini and Mancini were
very close to one another, neither of them ever referred to the other in his
writings.