Tautinio tapatumo savimonė
The Self-Awareness of National Identity

Summary/Abstract: The author holds that a significant problem of the present time is how to preserve identities - individual, national, cultural - in the long-term perspective of globalisation. The main idea of the article rests on the presumption that the essential attribute of authentic national identity is national self-awareness. It encompasses a variety of objective data - ethnic, cultural, historical - as the whole complex, interpreting it from a certain point of view. One of the features of national self-awareness is a sort of egocentricity - a vital concentration on the self as a certain point of account for everything that passes around. A certain degree of egocentricity is an existential need in cases when a nation is oppressed and is striving for liberation. Egocentricity is articulated as a number of external “we-they” relations, which are historically variable, fluctuating from the links of dialogue and reciprocity to those of confrontation and hostility. Lithuania, over its modern history, has passed through all kinds of external relations. The author is of the opinion that Lithuania is a nation with a weakly expressed egocentricity. National identity on the level of self-awareness is considered a value in itself, due to the uniqueness of each nation, thus constituting part of the cultural treasury of mankind. Over historical development, self-awareness usually moves away from its ethnic roots and manifests itself in the humanities, philosophy, belles-lettres, poetry and other forms of culture. One can speak therefore of a sort of partial form of consciousness, when it is expressed mainly in one or another field of culture, for example, in philosophy or poetry.

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