284 A Positive Century (1815–1914)Th e Decline of the Nationality School
Th e nationality school did not win widespread support from international
lawyers generally. Even in Italy, it by no means commanded universal as-
sent. Anzilotti, notably, gave it a wide berth. Th e attitude of Bluntschli is
instructive, since he was a theorist of statehood before he acquired an inter-
est in international law. He accorded a certain cautious welcome to the na-
tionality thesis. “A People which is conscious of itself, and of a po liti cal vo-
cation,” he conceded, “feels a natural need to embody itself in a State. If it
has the power to satisfy this impulse, then it has a natural right to found a
State.” Bluntschli also opined that, at least in practical terms, it is to a
state’s advantage to be monoethnic, as that would be most conducive to na-
tional unity.
Bluntschli, however, fi rmly rejected irridentism— the notion that a state is
justifi ed in expanding its borders so as to encompass members of its cultural
group who inhabit other countries. It is “stretching the principle of nation-
ality too far,” he warned, to demand that the boundaries of the state be “as
wide and as shift ing as those of the language of a People.” Th is moral
claim of nationalities to form states, he concluded, is a matter more for the
judgment of history than of judicial tribunals or legal publicists:
How far a people is able and worthy to form a State cannot in the
imperfect condition of international law be decided by any human
judgment, but only the judgment of God as revealed in the history of
the world. As a rule it is only by great struggles, by its own suff erings and
its own acts, that a nation can justify its claim.In the end, he regarded the nationality principle as lying “in the region of
policy, not... of public law.” It would be some time, he thought, before it
would be possible for “this merely moral imperative [to become] embodied
in [a] corresponding legal formula.”
Another weakness of the nationality school was that it was all too easy to
envisage the sentiment of nationalism turning away from the high- minded
idealism of Mazzini, Mancini, and Mamiani. Th ere have been too many in-
stances in which nationalist sentiments have assumed ugly forms, marred
by intolerance and aggression. Intolerance of minority groups was an espe-