When people speak of “the nation” and “the state” they often talk as if the two mean the same thing. Politicians talk about “national government,” news reports speak of an “international community of nations,” and for most people the terms seem interchangeable. But this blurring hides an important truth: the nation and the state are not the same. One is the people. The other is merely the tool they use to govern themselves.
A nation, when properly understood, is a particular people bound together by shared language, culture, history, and ancestry, a fixed bundle all confined within a defined territory. It grows naturally over time from families, communities, and shared experience. Ancestry forms a vital and constitutive part of that bundle. Without this organic foundation, there is no true nation, only a collection of individuals living under common administration. A state, by contrast, is the organized system of government, its laws, police, armies, courts, and bureaucracy, that the nation builds to protect itself and maintain order. The nation precedes and creates the state, which exists to serve it.
This basic order is turned upside down by fascist ideology, and this inversion is its original and most damaging sin.
Human beings have always formed groups. We begin with families, then expand outward in concentric circles into larger communities that share ways of speaking, worshiping, eating, and facing life together. Over time these groups become conscious of themselves as a distinct people, and thus the nation is born. A national people can exist without formal borders or a sovereign government. The Kurds remain a national people despite never having their own independent state for long. Jews preserved their identity as a people through centuries of exile and dispersion before Israel was reestablished in 1948. To become a true nation, all these proto-nations need to do is gain or regain a fixed territory.
The state comes later as a practical instrument. Its proper job is clear: defend the people and their homeland from outsiders, settle disputes according to the people’s own sense of justice, and create conditions in which families and communities can thrive. Duty flows only one way: the state owes total duty to the nation. When the state performs these tasks well, it earns loyalty. When it fails or turns against the people it was meant to serve, the nation retains the right to reform it or build something new in its place. When the state prevents the nation from doing so, it has become tyrannical and lost the mandate to govern.
This understanding is ancient and practical. The American Founders spoke of “We the People” ordaining a Constitution for “ourselves and our Posterity.” They viewed government as something created and limited by the people, not the other way around. Most traditional societies saw their kingdoms or republics as belonging to the people, not the reverse.
It was in 1932 that Benito Mussolini and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile laid out the core of fascist thought in The Doctrine of Fascism. They expressed their beliefs plainly: “For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative… It is not the nation which generates the State… Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people.” And in their most famous declaration they stated, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
This is fascism’s original sin: the explicit inversion of duty. The state was no longer the servant. It became master, creator, and object of total duty. The living people now existed to serve the state’s vision of glory, unity, and power. Redefinition and remaking of the people were downstream consequences of this root inversion.
Having declared the state the creator of the nation, the regime faced the immediate problem that the actual Italian people, deeply Catholic, regionally loyal, and culturally diverse, did not match the required material. Because the state claimed the exclusive right to create the nation, real Italians had to be remade. The actual people, Catholics who looked to the Pope, Sicilians loyal to their families and villages, Tuscans proud of their local traditions, were viewed as insufficient. They were too stubborn, too regional, too attached to old ways. The regime therefore set out to manufacture a “New Italian,” a “New Man” who would be disciplined, militarized, and devoted completely to the state.
Children were organized into youth groups for indoctrination. Propaganda filled newspapers, radio, and public spaces. Grand architecture and rituals celebrated the power of the state over everyday life. The goal was not to serve the Italian people as they actually were, but to reshape them into something worthy of the regime’s dreams of empire, glory, and stylized strength.
The living nation was reduced to a cost to be paid for a brighter future. Traditions, faith, and regional identities were treated not as treasures to protect but as obstacles to overcome. This idea, that real people are raw material to be molded by those in power, stands among the worst crimes of fascism. It reduces human beings from ends in themselves into mere means for the ideological project.
In the end, the Italian people never fully became the pliable “New Italians” the regime desired. When the wars turned disastrous, popular support collapsed. The state had tried to own the nation, but the nation withdrew its consent.
The danger of this inversion of duty did not disappear in 1945. The same error appears whenever any government, ideology, or elite claims the authority to remake the people for their supposed benefit. This same inversion appeared in Soviet communism’s project to forge a “New Soviet Man” and in the Jacobins’ efforts to remake France during the Revolution. It surfaces when the state treats citizens as problems to be solved rather than as the principals it is duty-bound to serve. It appears in large-scale projects that ignore the character of the actual population, in efforts to weaken family and local authority, and in the notion that national identity can be engineered through policy instead of grown through lived continuity.
A healthy nation-state must preserve the proper order. The state must be strong enough to protect the people and the homeland but limited enough that it can never devour them. It must respect family, church, local community, and private life as spheres that exist outside its total control. It must guard the nation’s inherited character and territory rather than try to invent a new one.
The nation speaks for itself. The state must give the nation the ability to assert itself or it is illegitimate. The nation, the concrete people, retains the right to reform, replace, or abolish the state when the state blocks that self-assertion, suppresses the nation’s will, or engineers outcomes against the historic core.
The state’s fundamental duty is service, nothing more. When it forgets this and demands that the people serve its ambitions instead, it commits fascism’s original sin, even if it never calls itself fascist.
The nation is not the state. The nation is the people, alive, particular, rooted, ancestral, and sovereign. The state is simply the tool to help them survive and flourish in their own land. Keeping this distinction clear protects liberty, preserves communities, and guards against the recurring temptation to treat human beings as clay to be reshaped upon the whim of a charismatic leader.
We must remember that the nation comes first, and keep the power of the state where it belongs: as our servant, not our god.
By William Scruton (a.k.a. the Nativist)