Review article
Constitutional Patriotism in Dolf Sternberger’s and Jürgen Habermas’s Political Theory
Antonio Pehar
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The concept and idea of constitutional patriotism emerged in divided Germany after the Second World War. It was promoted by Dolf Sternberger as a model of constructing a new identity of Germans on the ruins of citizen loyalty to the divided country. Sternberger does not consider patriotism the admiration of the homeland as a state of mind which was in German memory primarily linked to the German nation. He describes patriotism as a social and political behaviour of citizens who do not deem their own interests to be of paramount importance, but they give priority to the common good. Sternberger argues that at least until the end of the eighteenth century all forms of patriotism were constitutional patriotisms – understood as the love of laws and general freedoms. For Sternberger, the constitution is the homeland of citizens. Jürgen Habermas has adopted the term constitutional patriotism from Sternberger and endowed it with a conceptual meaning by adding a universalist component to it. Jürgen Habermas has developed his understanding of constitutional patriotism in the context of the 1986 “Historians’ Quarrel”. In the basis of Habermas’s concept lies the political ideal of the “nation of citizens”, which opposes the conception of the nation understood as a pre-political unity of language and culture. In this way, according to Habermas’s concept, the constitution as a supreme legal act should be established as its own reference. The point at issue is the idea of a self-referential constitution. The paper presents the respective points of the definition of constitutional patriotism by Dolf Sternberger and Jürgen Habermas and, exactly on the basis of these determinants, makes a comparison of their concepts of constitutional patriotism.
Keywords
constitutional patriotism; Dolf Sternberger; Jürgen Habermas; constitution; patriotism; freedom; nation; state-nation; nationalism; nation of citizens; Germany;
Hrčak ID:
99799
URI
Publication date:
5.3.2013.
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