ABSTRACT
The cultural hegemony of a nation-state can be self-contained without aspiring to actively export its culture. The philosophical basis of cultural nationalism was developed by the German Enlightenment philosopher Herder, who assumed the God-ordained uniqueness of nations, and that a nation must have a state of its own. Cultural nationalism is a feature of the politics of identity recognition, and is the integration of an indigenous culture into a territorially defined nation-state that maintains a cultural hegemony within its social, moral, and political life. A cultural hegemony values the importance and the benefits that it perceives in the traditional order, conformity, and coherence of a national society. Sceptics might say that moral imperialism has little effect other than to satisfy the domestic audiences of politicians, and can be labelled by its recipients as interference, arrogance or imperialism. The integrative role of cultural nationalism with political nationalism, is particularly apparent in self-determination movements.
