ABSTRACT
National museums act as central elements of cultural constitutions in an international grammar that gives them a role in the circulation and negotiation of relationships between nations. This chapter demonstrates the qualities of a specific segment of cultural institutions, namely national museums, in interacting with politics in negotiating long-standing dilemmas and acute traumas in making of community, nations and states. It details mainly the rationalist, formalist and modernist package that challenges the idea of cultural constitutions as a player in the making of nation-states. The various paths of post-Soviet transition regarding violence and community trust fruitfully and more carefully evaluated in relation to the cultural logics built up by the diverse cultural constitutions. As a net result, fostering of a long and unified political history or of an ethnic dimension of unity is renounced within cultural constitutions that work as concert halls, at least as the main source of unification, while other means of cultural unity formulates by diversities.
