If such mediating links do not exist or cease to perform their proper function the nation or its important sections become alienated from the government and the integrity or independence of the political community is jeopardized.

             The constitution is thus the mechanism which in practice ensures the identity of the national spirit with the attitudes and actions of the multitude of groups and individuals comprising a nation. In this respect Hegel believed that the modern monarchial state of his time had an advantage over earlier political communities because it linked the individual to the community in an organized institutionalized way while, for example, the ancient republics relied mainly on non-institutional factors (i.e., sentiment, character and education). Hegel's concept of nationhood, unlike that of the contemporary German Romantics, is thus heavily political in nature. Pure culture or common ethnic and linguistic characteristics are not, in his view, sufficient by themselves to weld a large human group into a nation and to provide a firm focus of loyalty; only the possession of a common government and the tradition of political unity can do so. This theme is particularly strongly stressed in the first of Hegel's political writings, on the constitution of the German Empire.

             A nation, then, is an institutional complex and it is also an idea. "It is a Spirit having strictly defined characteristics, which erects itself into an objective world, that exists and persists in a particular religious form of worship, customs, constitution, and political laws-- in the whole complex of its institutions-- in the events and transactions that make up its history," Hegel says. "That is its work-- that is what this particular Nation is. Nations are what their deeds are." Nations and national sentiment are real. At the current stage of historical development the nation-state is the political expression of the Idea.