Now the interesting thing for us about a nationality is that it is always striving to become a nation.  A nation, as we have seen, may be composed of several nationalities; but such cases are rare, and are due to peculiar geographical conditions, as for example in Switzerland and Great Britain, or to external pressure, as in Belgium, which have as it were welded together the different racial elements into a single whole.  In general, therefore, a nation is simply a nationality which has acquired self-government; it is nationality plus State.  “Ireland a nation,” the warcry of the Irish Nationalist party, is a claim, not a statement of fact; Ireland will become a nation when its desire for self-government is satisfied.  The case is instructive because it shows that it is not necessary for a nationality to become a sovereign State in order to be in the full sense of the word a nation.  It is perfectly possible, as our Serb remarked, for several nations to form a single sovereign state; but as a general rule all such nations will be allowed to manage their own internal affairs.  The self-governing Dominions of the British Empire and the Magyars of Hungary are nations, though they are subordinate to their respective imperial governments in questions of peace and war, treaty obligations, etc.

The real test of national existence is ultimately a sentimental one.  Does the nationality inhabiting a given country regard the government under which it lives as a true expression of its peculiar genius and will?  Does the State, of which it forms a part, exist by its consent, or has it been imposed upon it by some alien authority or nationality?  Is it a territorial unity, or has it been split up into sections by artificial frontiers?  All these questions must be answered before we can say of any nationality that it is also a nation.  The “national idea,” therefore, which has been one of the chief factors in modern history, is essentially an idea of development.  Its root is the conception of nationality, that is of a people consciously united by race, language, and culture; and from this springs the larger conception of nationhood, that is of a nationality possessing its own political institutions, governed by its own consent, and co-extensive with its natural boundaries.  As we shall see later, political development does not always stop at the Nation-State.  Further growth, however, is extra-national in character; it may either take the parasitical form of one nation imposing its will and its “culture” upon other nations, or it may assume the proportions of that highest type of polity yet known to mankind, a commonwealth of nations freely associating together within the confines of a single sovereign State.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See Chapter IX. for further treatment of this.]