The concept of a political nation and ethnic-framed conflicts in the economic paradigm of a politic

The form and intensity of national conflicts characteristic of modernity revealed the inadequacy of the dominant method to represent the nation and the national in the modernist theories of the nation. Revision of the conceptual foundations of modernist theories seems, for the reasons identified in the study, impossible in the context of liberal metaphysics and the economic paradigm of the politic. The only possible and available way to modernize the generally accepted understanding of the nation as a civic association is to radicalize the modernist approach in the direction of finally removing the remnants of naturalism. Constructivism (R. Brubaker) suggests, relying on cognitivism, to revise the concept of group identity, to represent the group without groups, which allows us to consider the national conflict as ethnically framed, to reduce it into a series of completely private social conflicts (downsize the conflict), and ultimately to the interests of autonomous individuals, whose nationality is seen as a result of their free choice and can be redefined.