Political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons. On the one hand, constitutional patriotism — understood as a post-national, universalist form of democratic political allegiance — is rejected on account of its abstract quality. On the otherhand, it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while apprearing universalist, is in fact particular through and through. According to this genealogical critique, it is held that constitutional patriotism might have been appropriate in the context when it originated — (...) namely West Germany, a half-nation with a deeply compromised sense of nationality on account of the Nazi past — but it is not universally applicable. This article reconstructs the origins of constitutional patriotism arguing that both the ‘protective’ and state-centred patriotism of Dolf Sternberger, and the ‘purifying’ patriotism of Jurgen Habermas — focused mainly on the public sphere — can indeed be understood as relying on ‘supplements of particularily’. However, there are also normative connections between universalist constitutional morality and militant democracy on the one hand, and universalist constitutionalist morality and an imperative to remember on the other. Thus, the genealogical critique by itself is insufficient to invalidate the idea of constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

The present article is primarily concerned with the imagined community of liberal intellectuals, rather than the community that "objectively" existed. This imaginary community constructed notions of the collective identity of their own group as well as that of Russian society. For this purpose, they instrumentalized the notions of "progress," "backwardness," "culturedness" and "benightedness", thereby creating hierarchies in which the "constructors" of collective identities granted themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and society. Special attention is paid to the prominent (...) role Russia 's liberal historians played in this process insofar as historians possessed great power in nineteenthcentury Europe—the power to tell their states and societies about their past, present, and future—and this transformed them into professional producers of identities. Their work combined expert knowledge and ideological clichés in a highly complex manner. The central question posed is to what extent and in what respect the reality constructed by Russian intellectuals coincided with the actions of intellectuals in other European regions or, on the contrary, to what extent their discursive activities had a specifically local character. (shrink)