Being the nation a value, a desire, an inspiration (i. e., abstract) while the state is a thing, actual and objective, the struggle for constructing a nation (a new nation), or to hold that my own nation is better than any other, cannot be connected to a political discourse about societies which we are accustomed to name «state». At the same time, to refer to individual genetic seeds, or to tradition or local history, constrain to underestimate or denigrate other nations and the nationals of other countries. Nations are, by definition, selfish, and historically conflictual. To be able to oppose to such prejudice we may analyse the linkage between nation and state,
remembering that the second is able to realize structures, social political, economic, whilst the first has been historically at the origins of a lot of conflicts, clashes, wars... Israel and her history is a really good exemple. The country of an hebrew has been, for millennials, the world; after the Second World War, the new-born state tried hard to realize the overlapping between the nation and the state. We know very well as the things worked out. Consequently, it is important to maintain a strong difference between an ideal and a fact. Who is able to establish finally the borders of a perfect (exact) «State of Israel», corresponding to something natural, and at the same time acceptable by the palestinian people? A great importance maintain the Rokkan’s lesson about the strain and steps needed to realize the statebuilding. The well known sentence by Ch. Tilly - «war made the state and the state made war» is, likewise, extremely telling. The fact is that very frequently we call «nations» countries that are just «states» for the outer world. Sovereinty can’t apply to nations, but pertains to states. The alternative danger is nationalism, which imposes the duty to declare the superiority of my country over every other. But we don’t have more duties towards the neighbour and the less toward the distant, because duties are everywehere the same. From this point of view, il would be better to appoach the argument in an internationalistic perspective, which is suitable to demonstrate that in fact wars fighted for nation were (or are) actually wars fought by states for power, which is a material thing. So went in Italy: 7 sovereign states in 1860, just only one the following year. Where did they end up (seven nations, one state?)? The most important thing to do is to maintain nation and state separated. Even federalism proposes the independence of nations (as a first step), because only when (or if) they all had become free nations it would had been possibile to unify all of them in an unique state, the word (not-nationalistic) federation.