“ We speak the same language as the British.
Our mothers sing the same English folk songs to their children.
But we are still different nations.
Because they need a king.
And we need self-government .”
Benjamin Franklin
There is an often-used argument that should have long ago become archaic and little used – an appeal to the genetic origin of a particular nation. While the argument should only speak about compliance with certain values and cultural traditions
Ethnology of the last century concluded that the only indisputable criterion of ethnicity is self-awareness. Everything else – origin, language, faith, culture, territory can be refuted, but self-awareness certainly cannot. A person rarely seriously asks the question of self-identification, but in critical situations, he is forced to do so. He decides for himself the question, where are the strangers and where are his own? This overrides any other signs – origin, language, etc.
Modernization overcomes ethnicity and gives birth to a nation. Ethnicity (people, “language”) is a natural cultural phenomenon characteristic of pre-subjective (pre-modern) times, and a Nation is a socio-historical community characteristic of modernity, the New Time, which began in Europe half a millennium ago.
The demand of the residents of the Königsberg (Kaliningrad) region for self-determination, for the creation of an independent Baltic Republic of Königsberg on the territory of their region will mean their transformation into a political nation. And we are talking, first of all, about a nation where political culture is more important than ethnic culture, where a nation is only a political category, a contractual state about following certain principles.
From the moment of the Declaration of Independence of the Baltic Republic of Königsberg, citizens who joined it will no longer be considered Russians, since the main factor of Russian identity is loyalty to Moscow and recognition of Moscow’s unconditional right to exercise power over it.
The desire of the residents of the Königsberg (Kaliningrad) region to create their own political, and civil nation is not least dictated by the understanding that the Russian community, as a nation, is not aimed at creating conditions for the prosperity of citizens – the Russians have formed such an administrative and state structure in which the rate of population decline, the conditions for raising offspring deprive us of hope for the future. We proceed from the fact that a person, having a limited supply of time in this life, must have free will in organizing his living space. The government system should be determined by those people who live in the territory in the present, based on their own benefit and the predicted benefit for posterity.
For the sake of our descendants, we must take responsibility for creating better conditions for future generations of residents of the Baltic Republic of Königsberg – the Baltic people.
Who are the Baltic people?
Taking the collapse of the USSR as a starting point, one can see the emergence on the territory of the Königsberg (Kaliningrad) region of a Russian-speaking subethnic group, formed in 1990-2020, in the course of active socio-economic exchange with neighbouring European countries – Lithuania, Poland, Germany. These are people who speak Russian but think European.
For the most part, these are natives of the region, already born in the second and third generations, most of them either have not been to Russia or were passing through. These residents regularly visited neighbouring European states. Some for work, organizing a business, others for tourism purposes – to relax at the weekend.
As a result, now 30 years later, this part of the population (the majority) has a very clear understanding of how business can be organized, how local government should work, what the responsibility of an official should be and what social responsibilities the state can and should have. There is a clear orientation towards European values of a social, legal state, (using the examples of neighbours). This is a major, often insurmountable difference with the inhabitants of the rest of Russia, who did not have such examples. Hearing from Russians: “Everything that officials do is beautiful and fair!”, the Baltic people say: “For Russians, yes, but for us, only beautiful things are beautiful and only fair things are fair.”
Accordingly, there is a difference in views on the quality of relations with the countries of the European Union between residents of the Königsberg (Kaliningrad) region and Russians: the Baltic people are interested in warm relations with their neighbours (Poland, Lithuania, Germany) and the rest of Europe, while residents of Russia are either indifferent to such relations, or hateful.
As a result, those born and raised in the Königsberg (Kaliningrad) region in the second and third generations cannot be called Russians in the full sense, since a “Russian” is a collective image of a subject tied to a certain way of life. Here we are talking about the fact that the Baltic people support a completely different standard of living and commitment to different values than the Russians.
Now many Baltic people have already made a political choice – not to be part of the “great Russian culture”, the culture of the empire and the enslavement of one’s will, but to gain and realize their own identity, which serves as the basis for the formation of a “nation”, if we understand it as a political community of solidarity.
We affirm freedom as the political idea of the Baltic Republic. Freedom, not coercion, and citizenship, not submission.
The main criterion for the difference between citizenship of the Baltic Republic of Königsberg and citizenship of the Russian Federation will be the nature of the definable connection that arises between the individual and the state. The nationality of the Russian Federation is characterized by a one-way relationship, which presupposes the participation of a person solely as an obligated subject in relation to the state. Citizenship of the Baltic Republic of Königsberg, on the contrary, will be characterized by a two-way relationship between the individual and the state, expressed in mutual rights, duties and responsibilities.
ГАЗЕТА "СВОБОДНЫЙ КЁНИГСБЕРГ"
