Potential political culture expression

I have already explained why the requirement that the political culture that characterizes a nation must be endorsed by co-nationals excludes official cultures in an oppressive society from being considered as nations. But what exactly constitutes national political cultures in the partial or complete absenee of corresponding public spheres, and how can the beliefs and attitudes that constitute such cultures, which I call potential political cultures, be expressed ... 

Potential political cultures can also have a corresponding set of beliefs and attitudes expressed by co-nationals abroad. This expression does not always correspond to and cannot immediately stand in for a potential political culture of the nation in the homeland. It first needs to be verified whether this set of beliefs is indeed how the nation in the homeland perceives its own status. 

Potential in potential political culture is not equivalent to unexpressed or partially expressed. Some potential political cultures are unexpressed political cultures. This is often the case for occupied nations whose political cultures have been suppressed. There are many other situations, however, where potentiality is not characterized exclusively by lack of expression. I already mentioned the possibility that after a potential political culture is allowed proper expression, it may either turn into an ethnic culture or split into the political cultures of several nations. Thus, potential cultures can be expressed without being actualized. ... 

In the previous chapter, I sketched a number of ways in which a potential political culture can be partially expressed. Some are expressed negatively a set of beliefs constitutive of the minority group agency is not expressed in public sphere, but beliefs and actions of the majority culture are mobilized against what they perceive as the collective agency of the minority. It is usually the case that a negative poten-... 

A potential political culture can be negative from within with respect to its vacuous counterpart in several ways. In a majority nation, co-nationals may share a belief that they do not self-identify with the existing official expression of their national identity without having a clear idea of what their national identity should be. In such a case, the system of connections that allows the belief to be a verifiably shared second-order belief is not elaborate and lacks proper expression. Many group members can be sure only of what they collectively do not want or deem false or ridiculous the system of officially propagated beliefs. If a proper positive expression of the potential political culture is hindered, how are the constimtive beliefs shared This general question must be clarified for all kinds of potential political cultures. 

In the case of the negative expression of a minority s potential political culture, the minority can mobilize around its rejection of those policies that the majority has aimed against it, even if the policies are aimed at the very elimination of structures of communication among minority citizens. The minority may also try to preserve the group practices that maintain its identity. 

Minorities with officially established structures of government may have a negative potential political culture of a mixed type. In the former USSR, national and autonomous republics and districts had officially sanctioned political cultures that were supposed to express their peoples attitudes toward and beliefs about their nationhood. They had local vacuous political cultures that expressed the official national identity. Their potential political cultures were expressed negatively with regard to their own vacuous political culture and with respect to the political culture of the USSR. 

Potential political cultures are often supported or expressed, and thus partially turned into political cultures, by co-nationals abroad. The existence of a political culture in exile gives a boost to the internal potential political culture. It is better, however, to treat the political culture of exile as a potential political culture for the nation in the homeland, for if the political culture is not expressed in the homeland, it is not clear how the nation in the homeland perceives its own status. 

A group can only be identified as a nation if it expresses its political culture sufficiently to reach the level at which it can be determined that members of a group share the required kind of beliefs and can identify with them. The idea of potentiality is used to indicate that the level of expression is not fixed and that the idea of nationhood should be considered dynamically. We may conclude that the group is a national group, even if its members still need to meet certain conditions in order... 

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