The state stands over against other states. Each one is independent.

What does this mean?

Independence is the first freedom and the highest honor of a people.

A false wish:

Some say a state should give up its independence and merge with another. Whoever talks like this knows little of the sense of self that an independent people has.

At the beginning:

In history, states first appear as independent powers. This holds even when they are hardly developed inside. So at the beginning a single person usually stands at their head: a patriarch, a tribal chief.

Summary: Every state is independent over against others. This independence is the first freedom and the highest honor of a people.

§ 442. The ethical spirit is itself 1) an individual, having its actuality in a particular, determinate people. As such an existence, its totality produces immediate naturalness – geographical and climatic determinacy; above all, it is also at a particular stage of development of its spiritual life, and only in this does it comprehend, apprehend, and constitute itself.

§ 443. 2) As such a single individual, it is exclusive toward other such individuals. In their relation to one another, arbitrariness and contingency obtain, because the universal — for the sake of the autonomous self-sufficiency of these persons, who are in themselves a real totality and have no further need — ought merely to be, and is not actual.