Pojem národa u Františka Palackého

In the revolutionary years 1848–49 the Czech historian František Palac¬ký was forced to re-formulate his response to the question What is (the Czech) nation? From starting points kin to German romanticism and to German national-liberal historiography in particular, he defines both a nation and a (national) public as well as the “basic equality of nations in rights and dignity” as necessary conditions of constitutional order. He elaborates an original solution of the relation between the cosmopolitan and the national cultures, of nation in a political and in a cultural sense, of the principle of self-determination and of shared sovereignty. He defends the thesis that in Palacký’s individual texts in the spring of 1848 we can follow his testing of the suitability of individual pre-political projects of the nation for Czech policy within the framework of the shared Danube state. He stresses particularly his relationship to the tradition which sought to transform the territorial conception of the nation, including bilinguality, into a distinctive conception of a modern nation (Bolzano/Woltmann, Young Čechie/Young Bohemia [at the time the Czech and the German designation for the Czech lands]).