The Philosophy of Law: Public Right, § 53: Nature and Division of the Right of Nations
The individuals, who make up a People, may be regarded as Natives of the Country sprung by natural descent from a Common Ancestry (congcniti), although this may not hold entirely true in detail. Again, they may be viewed according to the intellectual and juridical relation, as born of a common political Mother, the Republic, so that they constitute, as it were, a public Family or NATION (gens, natio) whose Members are all related to each other as Citizens of the State. As members of a State, they do not mix with those who live beside them in the state of Nature, considering such to be ignoble. Yet these savages, on account of the law less freedom they have chosen, regard themselves as superior to civilised peoples; and they constitute tribes and even races, but not States.—The public Right of States (jus publicum Civitatum) in their relations to one another, is what we have to consider under the designation of the ‘Right of Nations.’ Wherever a State, viewed as a Moral Person, acts in relation to another existing in the condition of natural freedom, and consequently in a state of continual war, such Right takes it rise.
The Right of Nations in relation to the State of War may be divided into: 1. The Right of going to War; 2. Right during War; and 3. Right after War, the object of which is to constrain the nations mutually to pass from this state of war, and to found a common Constitution establishing Perpetual Peace. The difference between the Right of individual men or families as related to each other in the state of Nature, and the Right of the Nations among themselves, consists in this, that in the Right of Nations we have to consider not merely a relation of one State to another as a whole, but also the relation of the individual persons in one State to the individuals of another State, as well as to that State as a whole. This difference, however, between the Right of Nations and the Right of Individuals in the mere State of Nature, requires to be determined by elements which can easily be deduced from the conception of the latter.