The Formation of National Identity as an Answer of the Russian State to the Challenges of Our Time. Part I

In the article, I seek the answer to the main question of the confrontation of contemporary nation-states with globalization processes, which gradually and systematically neutralize specific cultural and historical experience, embodied in language, customs, traditions, religion, art, and everyday life of the various societies. Where should lie the inevitable contact line between the national (one’s own, local, particular) and the global? How to reconcile the cultural practices that seems to be incompatible: on the one hand, one’s own, traditional, rooted in archetypes practices and, on the other hand, borrowed, alien, often imposed practices? What kind of the combination of these two practices will allow the country to be integrated on the fair principles into the global cultural and civilizational space and will form the modern way of life of the population? How should the domestic national strategies for the economic and socio-cultural development of the Russian state be built? The reasoning in the article leads to the idea that in the confrontation between different cultural and civilizational groups, which developed under the conditions of dynamically developing globalization processes, the only way to preserve a national statehood is the real independence (not illusory, stated only in words, as happens so far in many countries) and strengthening and further development of Russia precisely as a sovereign national state. In the face of the increasing challenges of our time, the basic principle of a practically effective mechanism for strengthening statehood is the reliance on one’s own national identity. This should be the national idea of modern Russia, its official state ideology.

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