A people, as a state, is spirit in its substantial rationality and immediate actuality, and is therefore the absolute power on earth; each state is accordingly, in relation to others, in sovereign independence. To be such for the other, that is, to be recognized by it, is its first, absolute entitlement. But this entitlement is at the same time merely formal, and the demand for this recognition of the state, simply because it is such a state, is abstract; whether it is in fact such a being-in-and-for-itself depends upon its content, constitution, and condition, and recognition — containing as it does an identity of the two — likewise depends upon the view and the will of the other.

Just as the individual is as little an actual person without relation to other persons (§ 71 and elsewhere), so too the state is as little an actual individual without relation to other states (§ 322). The legitimacy of a state — and more specifically, insofar as it is turned outward, [the legitimacy] of its power of the crown — is, on the one hand, a relation that pertains wholly to its internal [affairs] (a state ought not to interfere in the internal affairs of another); on the other hand, it must equally essentially be completed through recognition by other states. But this recognition demands a guarantee that it will likewise recognize the others who are to recognize it, that is, that it will respect them in their independence, so that what goes on within it cannot be a matter of indifference to them. In the case of a nomadic people, for example, or in general of one that stands at a lower stage of culture, the question even arises as to how far it can be regarded as a state at all. The religious point of view (formerly among the Jewish people, [and] the Mohammedan peoples) can still contain a higher opposition which does not permit the universal identity belonging to recognition.