282 DESTINY DISRUPTED
collective units, and should relinquish their individual personalities to
their nation. "Say not /but we," he harangued his fellow revolutionaries
in his pamphlet On the Duties of Man. '1.et each man among you strive
to incarnate his country in himself."^4 Mazzini went on to assert a theory
of collective rights based on nationalism. Every nation had "a right" to a
territory of its own, a "right" to leaders from amongst its own, a "right"
to defined borders, a "right" to extend those borders as far as necessary to
encompass all the people who comprised the nation, and a "right" to
complete sovereignty within those borders. It was only right, natural,
and noble, he said, for the people of a nation to live within one geo-
graphically continuous state, so that none of them would have to live
among strangers.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, movements fueled by na-
tionalism spawned first Germany and then Italy, but the virus spread be-
yond these countries, into eastern Europe, where a multitude of disparate
communities speaking many languages, claiming different ethnic origins,
and telling diverse stories about their origins rattled around as indigestible
parts of two ramshackle empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian.
The government of both empires tried to squelch all nationalists within
their borders, but succeeded only in driving them underground, where
they went on seething in secrecy. European cartoonists imagined these
revolutionaries as stout little bearded men carrying bombs shaped like
bowling balls under bulky overcoats: an amusing image. The real anar-
chist and terrorist movements spawned by European nationalism were
not so amusing. And it was from here that nationalism rolled east into the
Islamic heartlands.
Before leaving Europe, however, let me mention two other nationalist
movements of consequence that matured in the West. One had immediate
relevance for the Ottoman Empire; the other would signify later. The latter
one took shape in North America where a new country formed. Techni-
cally, this country was born when thirteen small colonies of British settlers
revolted against their home government and launched independent des-
tinies, but in many ways the confederation they put together didn't actually
become a nation-state until the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Before that war,
people in the United States spoke of their country as "these united states."
After the war, they called it "the United States."^5 The issue of slavery trig-