Нация после истории: парадоксы нациостроительства в XXI веке

В статье рассматриваются трансформации нациостроительства в XXI в. Анализируется, как история утрачивает роль объединяющего метанарратива, уступая место ситуативной политике памяти и символическому конструированию идентичности. Особое внимание уделяется «национализирующимся государствам», которые используют инструменты Модерна для продвижения архаизирующих моделей солидарности, основанных на биополитике, страхе и ностальгии. Автор заявляет об отсутствии конфликта интересов.

*публикация подготовлена в рамках научного проекта (гранта) «Создание российской историографической модели политико-правовых знаний и ее применение для разработки перспективных средств противодействия идеологическим искажениям цивилизационного развития России», осуществляемого федеральным государственным бюджетным учреждением науки Институтом государства и права Российской академии наук при финансовой поддержке Минобрнауки России (соглашение от 12 июля 2024 г.)

This article analyses the paradoxical transformations of nation-building in the 21st century, in a context where the decline of nationalism predicted by many theorists has not materialized. It explores the evolution of the role of history in shaping national identity: from being a key legitimizing “grand narrative” of the modern era, serving as a “textbook of citizenship,” to its current state. The author demonstrates that the crisis of metanarratives, the postcolonial and linguistic turns, the fragmentation of the public sphere, and the digitalization of historical knowledge have deprived national history of its former monopolistic authority, transforming it from a foundation of identity into a subject of critical reflection and constant public contestation. The primary focus of the work is on the phenomenon of “nationalizing states” (following R. Brubaker’s terminology), primarily those that emerged in the post-Soviet space and Eastern Europe. These states, for which the nation is considered a project yet to be fully realised, exhibit distinctive strategies of political mobilisation. It is argued that in their practice, the place of a cohesive historical narrative is taken by situational memory politics and symbolic identity engineering. Contemporary nationalism in these countries employs the institutional tools of modernity (media, the education system, the legal framework) to promote archaising models of solidarity based on biopolitics ("the health of the nation"), fear (of globalization, migration, loss of sovereignty), and nostalgia. The past does not disappear in this process, but its function changes radically: history ceases to be a linear path to progress, becoming instead a repository of situationally extracted symbols, traumas, and images used to justify the current political agenda. The universalist project of the nation as a community of citizens is replaced by an organicist model of the nation as a population united by “blood” and “soil.” This shift is manifest in policy areas ranging from symbolic politics (e.g., monument removal, linguistic legislation) to migration and citizenship laws that privilege ethnic kin, effectively creating a hierarchical distinction between a core nation and other citizens. Consequently, the nation-building project in such contexts appears not as a negation of modernity but as its paradoxical and hypertrophied continuation: progressivism narrows to a national teleology where the future is a reward for correct nationalist policy; sovereignty is absolutized into a totalizing demand for control over borders, information, and cultural codes; and the very construction of identity transforms into a competitive market offering of a “national brand.” The article concludes that this contemporary form of nationalism represents a tactical management of collective affects and anxieties within a fragmented public sphere, using the means of modernity to serve goals that often resonate with pre-modern sensibilities. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

*This publication was prepared within the framework of the scientific project (grant) “Creation of a Russian historiographic model of political and legal knowledge and its application for the development of promising means of countering ideological distortions of the civilizational development of Russia,” implemented by the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with the financial support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia (agreement dated July 12, 2024).

национализм, национализирующиеся государства, место памяти, национальная идентичность, исторический нарратив
nationalism, nationalizing states, place of memory, national identity, historical narrative

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