문화 민족주의: 독일 극우 보수주의의 이념적 뿌리 = Cultural Nationalism: The Ideological Rootsof German Far-Right Conservatism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper aims to elucidate the substance of “cultural nationalism,” understood here as a formative influence on the contemporary global diffusion of far-right conservatism, by tracing its trajectory through the case of modern and contemporary Germany. Cultural nationalism overlaps with political nationalism, which is oriented toward the creation of a nation-state, yet it also denotes an ideology that pursues the formation of a national community and locates the foundations of its collective identity in cultural resources such as myth, religion, symbols, language, folklore, tradition, and history. Johann Gottfried Herder, widely identified as a pivotal point of origin for cultural nationalism in the late eighteenth century, was among the earliest thinkers to foreground the intimate linkage between “culture” and “nation.” From the nineteenth century through the early twentieth, German intellectual circles witnessed the prominence of a discourse of Germany as a “cultural nation” (Kulturnation), posed against the British and French model of the “state nation” (Staatsnation), a contrast visible, for example, in the writings of the historian Friedrich Meinecke and the author Thomas Mann. In Germany, the ideology and discourse of cultural nationalism ultimately reached their fullest development under the Third Reich, as can be seen in the texts of Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, a culmination that conduced to the irreversible catastrophe of war and war crimes.
Yet cultural nationalism did not disappear from Germany after the Second World War, despite denazification. It persisted as a political and ideological legacy, leaving in particular the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), founded in 1964 and renamed “Die Heimat” in 2023. In the process of defining and reviving an ethnic community, cultural nationalism, which evolved in close relation to ethnic nationalism, and political nationalism did not function as a simple “mixture,” that is, the mere combination of two separable substances. Rather, they functioned as the principal raw materials of a “compound,” generating a third ideological formation, such as fascism or Nazism.