REFLECTIONS ON THE STRUCTURE OF NATIONAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Abstract

In the article the emotional, not rational, is put fi rst in the understanding of national self-consciousness. Th e corporality of population, territory, culture artifacts take the axiological, nationally oriented meaning, and form the basis of the structure of national self-consciousness. Th e nation achieves the self-consciousness, being attributed to the elite, headed by the leadership fi gure, consolidated by self-assurance in the universal sense of national self-realization. National self-consciousness always involves the perspective of threat to the existence of the nation itself. So the possibility for the annihilation of the “others” proves to be legitimized. Th is negativity in the existing “legal states” cannot be “dialectically removed” yet.

Keywords:

national self-consciousness, national self-realization, public self-consciousness, Hegel, the structure of self-consciousness, the rational, the emotional, nation, rule-of-law state, population, territory, elite, culture artefacts, leadership fi gure, personifi cation.