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The Political Significance of Cultural Nationalism: The Slavophiles and Their Notion of a Russian Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Susanna Rabow-Edling
Susanna Rabow-Edling*
Affiliation:
Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Susanna.rabow-edling@eas1.uu.se
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Extract

For nearly a century, the contrast between a cultural and a political form of nationalism has been upheld. In the early twentieth century, Fredrich Meinecke made a distinction between the political nation, or Staatsnation, based on a common political history and a shared constitution, and the cultural nation, Kulturnation, based on a shared cultural heritage. The most important distinction between the two is that while membership in the former is voluntary, membership in the cultural nation is a matter not of choice, but of common objective identity. Meinecke maintained that political nationalism derived from the spirit of 1789, i.e. from the idea of the self-determination and sovereignty of the nation. Cultural nationalism, in contrast, was a striving for national individuality, characteristic of anti-Enlightenment German thought.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 441 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe 

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References

Notes

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