Ulrich Schmid, University of St Gallen
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The Constitution of the Current State: Art. 13 and Russian Cultural Politics
Article 13 of the Russian constitution prohibits any forms of (or reliance on?) state ideology. As of late, however, government officials have come to question the timeliness of this regulation. What they propose instead is a new “constitutional identity” that is an idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Habermas’ famous concept of “constitutional patriotism.” Habermas claimed that in a postnational era the constitution must be the only object of patriotism. In the Russian Federation, by contrast, the constitution should embody the necessary multinational patriotism that is required for the coherence of the state. The significance of this move lies in the fact that the constitution turns into a cornerstone for the ambitious project by which the Kremlin seeks to create a “Russian federal nation” (Rossiiskaia natsiia). Against this backdrop, significant emphasis is placed on the politics of culture in the securitization of the Russian state. In the absence of a functioning public sphere that would guarantee the democratic institutions, cultural and historical narratives step in to legitimize the strategies of the current political order.