Nation as a Choice

The paper examines Ernest Renan’s notion of the nation as an everyday plebiscite which draws on the post-Enlightenment idea of rational and free persons who make a social contract. A person as such does not belong to anything, but decides to belong to a nation and belongs to it on the grounds of a resolve made by will and (or) passion. Renan articulates a nation’s resolve to be by metaphoric juxtaposition with an existential resolve of a person, with the Nietzschean world of ja-sagen. Both these decisions cover all the three dimensions of the existential time: past, present, and future. Radicalising Renan’s thought, decisions must be understood as not only of the present, but also as of the present in the past and of the present in the future. The paper complicates this resolve by confronting Renan’s ideas with the problematics of the “difficult heritage”, guilt, and responsibility. These issues are elaborated in the field of the dramatic and tragic history of Lithuania: the fate of the Lithuanian diaspora, Holocaust, the annexation of the Klaipėda region, collaboration with the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Pushed in this way, Renan’s notions turn out especially relevant to current debates.