Citizenship and culture

This theoretical essay offers a point of view on a citizenship and so called "civil society" based on a strong programme in cultural theory, which treats culture as an analyticly autonomus sphere. It shows that an increased interest in a term "civil society" is connected with certain actual political issues. Recent theoretic conceptions as well as research practices focus on the topic mostly treats "civil society" as a subsytem of society or a sum of organizations beyond spheres of a state and a market. That leads to an analytic pasivization of an agent. One of works by Jürgen Habermas offers a much more culturaly sensitive model of citizenship based on a historical review of developement of civil movements in England, France and Germany. This type of identity is not easy to find in the Czech history. Bud we can find a few alternative and hostile types of identity and we show that they are able to accomodete in the democratic system in a form of cultural herritage and so they can be maintained even by generations without an experience of a communism. A source of these identities is concentrated around traditional Cczech autostereotype of a "little Chzech person" in a forms of: nationalism, privatism and narrow-minded opportunism. They are an obstracle for development of a real civic culture