The culturological aspect of the term “civic identity”

The article is devoted to the concept of “civic identity”. This concept has become a working term in a number of regulatory state documents on strategic planning in the Russian Federation adopted in recent decades. It is also used in domestic social science, philosophy, and the media. But this term is used in the Russian language space. The authors point to the relationship between the concepts of “civiс identity” and “national identity”. In the English-language tradition (and a number of other European language traditions), the term “national identity” denotes a set of forms of social identity that define an individual as a citizen in a national state. But in the Russian space, the concept of “nation” itself is traditionally understood as “ethnonation”, and in the Russian multinational state the use of the concept of “national identity” brings up difficulties of a legal, ethical, and cultural nature. To a certain extent, the concept of “civic identity” may be close to the concept of “macropolitical identity”, but civic identity is somewhat broader than macropolitical identity, the latter covering only the political aspects of an individual’s activity. The article also points out the inadequacy of understanding civic identity as awareness of legally formalized citizenship in the Russian Federation, with all the ensuing rights and obligations. The main thesis of the article is that civiс identity should have value and cultural foundations in addition to legal and political ones. Based on the concept of a “civilization state” put forward in the “Concept of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation” in March 2023, the authors point to the possibility of bringing the concept of “civic identity” closer to the term “civilizational identity”. It is noted that these concepts are not identical, but civic identity also adopts values declared at the state level and accepts the historical heritage of the state through culture.