This higher personality is truly the nation, inasmuch as it is the
State. The nation does not beget the State, according to the decrepit
nationalistic concept which was used as a basis for the publicists of
the national States in the Nineteenth Century. On the contrary, the
nation is created by the State, which gives the people, conscious of
their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence.
The right of a nation to its independence is derived not from a
literary and ideal consciousness of its own existence, much less from
a _de facto_ situation more or less inert and unconscious, but from an
active consciousness, from an active political will disposed to
demonstrate in its right; that is to say, a kind of State already in
its pride (_in fieri_). The State, in fact, as a universal ethical
will, is the creator of right.