"Patriotism and Collaborationism" - Karen AGEKYAN

Karen Agekyan's article "Patriotism and Collaborationism," the sixth part of the cycle "The Ethnic Nation: Values and Interests," is devoted to an analysis of the phenomenon of collaborationism as a special type of political subordination closely intertwined with national-patriotic ideology.

Introduction and Methodology
The author proceeds from the thesis that the concepts of "patriotism" and "collaborationism" are traditionally counterposed as mutually exclusive, yet historical material demonstrates their frequent combination: collaborationism is often justified and grounded precisely by national-patriotic ideas. The author criticizes the widespread legal definition of collaborationism as "cooperation with the enemies of one's own country/state," since it does not explain the essence of the phenomenon — a person does not cooperate with the enemy so long as he considers the state his own; often it is precisely the ruling power that the collaborationist perceives as the enemy of the Fatherland, while an external force is seen as the only ally.

Key Proposition
Agekyan proposes distinguishing between:
• "everyday collaborationism" — the forced coexistence of a population with a foreign power;
• "active collaborationism" — cooperation that builds its own ideological logic.

The author's final definition: collaborationism is subordination to an external force and cooperation with it on an unequal basis, having a political component, whereby the "externality" of the force may be determined in relation both to the state and to the ethnos/nation and its historical territory. The root cause of collaborationism is always named as a subjective sense of weakness and a deficit of time.

Historical Typology
Drawing on the history of Khmelnytsky (relying on Mykhailo Hrushevsky's interpretation), the Polish, Bulgarian, and Irish national movements, as well as the Ukrainian historiographical polemics surrounding Mazepa and the OUN, the author shows that collaborationism can arise:

1. in a conflict between a "metropole" and external forces, including situations of elite schism when two external "masters" collide (an example being Armenian history between Rome/Parthia, Persia/Byzantium, etc.);
2. within the very core of the state as a result of conflict between communities or between power and opposition (religious wars, the civil war in Nicaragua).

It is separately emphasized that collaborationism is not reducible to military occupation: under modern conditions it manifests itself through "soft power" — the recognition of an external right to establish political norms, participation in supranational structures as instances of higher authority.

"Vichyism" and the Resistance
The case of France in the 1940s, including quotations from the historian Henry Rousso, is used by the author to demonstrate that Marshal Pétain's Vichy collaborationism was not reducible to personal gain or fear, but rested on a stable right-wing anti-liberal national ideology that fused the "National Revolution" and foreign-policy cooperation with the Reich into a single project.

Conclusion
The article's key conclusion is that collaborationism should be regarded not as a moral anomaly, but as a regular historical phenomenon of subordination requiring typological analysis beyond the narrow context of the Second World War, while preserving an understanding of the fundamental differences in the moral evaluation of specific cases.