Political culture vs. sovereign state

Regardless of the difficulties of the state to identify with the nation and to appear as its authentic representative, in Greek political culture the state also faces an inherent problem that is consistent with the nature of the political system. We established earlier that corresponding to the nation-state in the small-scale anthropocentric cosmosystem was the city. However, the resistances of the political culture which comes out of the small politeian scale, albeit strong in the past, was not the main source of controversy over the nation-state. The more significant controversy concerns the relationship it introduces between society and politics, which completely ignores the definition of politics in terms of freedom and therefore excludes a political system that expresses it. The contrast of the inherited political culture in the system of the nation-state is basically concentrated: First, on the principle of the unity of the political system in the whole state and, therefore, on its opposition to the principle of political auto-institutionalization of the “difference.” This explains the fact that Greece displays the largest resistance to the development of self-administration among the countries of the European Union, despite the fact that it does not have problems of cultural (ethnic, etc.) differentiation. Second, on the principle of the dichotomy between the social and the political, which means the exclusion of the society from the political system. This exclusion in modern societies was consistent with their a-political nature and consequently did not create problems of legitimization or controversy.