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cially severe challenge, since the nationalities of the world are not (by a long
shot) con ve niently grouped into compact territories that can be neatly de-
marcated from those of other nationalities. Basically, the Italian school
faded gradually, once the country’s unifi cation was achieved in 1859– 61. But
not the ideals that it articulated. In fact, in the post– World War II era, the
ideals of the nationality school would experience something of a resurgence
in the decolonization movement.
Solidarism
Th e fi nal heterodoxical movement in international law that arose in the
nineteenth century lacks a readily recognizable label, even though it is alive
and well at the present day. Here, it will be designated as solidarism. It has
also been called the so cio log i cal approach and sometimes the functionalist
approach (labels that became more common in the following century). It
has sometimes been termed mutualism. What ever name is applied, the core
idea of solidarism is interdependence. Of all of the schools of thought of in-
ternational law, it was (and is) the one with the strongest commitment to the
age- old Aristotelian principle of innate human sociability— to the point that
it may be regarded as the reformulation of that principle into modern terms.
In the specifi c sphere of international law, solidarism was marked by a rejec-
tion of the positivist reverence for state sovereignty and in de pen dence, in
favor of a stress on the international community as a whole. In place of the
positivist concern for safeguarding the fundamental rights of states, there is
a stress on the promotion of good citizenship in a global community and the
steady promotion of the general welfare of all persons.
Th e word “solidarism” was coined in the early nineteenth century by a
frustrated French po liti cal activist named Pierre LeRoux, as a nonrevolution-
ary substitute for “fraternity” in the French revolutionary triadic rallying cry
of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” More than just the name was French. Soli-
darism itself was as distinctively French a creation as voluntarism was a Ger-
man one, or the nationality school Italian. It would not become a major force
in international law until the following century. But its roots were clearly
planted in the present period. In its inception, it appeared in two principal
variants, which may be labeled the technocratic and the so cio log i cal.