Public debate and academic analysis on the sentence of the International Court of Justice regarding the maritime dispute between Chile and Peru, and in the face of a new case with Bolivia, they are based on the assumption of considering the nation state as an absolute explanatory category. The logical derivation is that the "national interest" is expressed and identifies absolutely in the nation state. Nationalism is the hidden symbolic form whose effects frame the practices and discourses of actors, and are sustained theoretically (with ideological interests) in the classics constitutive elements (and limited) of the state: population, territory, sovereignty, reaffirming the national imagined community. Nevertheless it avoids the logic of global capitalism and it conceals the polysemy of terms such as sovereignty. This article analyzes presidential discourses, reflecting on the ideas and public discourses of the conflicts between Chile-Peru and Chile- Bolivia.