For nearly a century, the contrast between a cultural and a political form of nationalism has been upheld. In the early twentieth century, Fredrich Meinecke made a distinction between the political nation, or Staatsnation, based on a common political history and a shared constitution, and the cultural nation, Kulturnation, based on a shared cultural heritage. The most important distinction between the two is that while membership in the former is voluntary, membership in the cultural nation is a matter not of choice, but of common objective identity. Meinecke maintained that political nationalism derived from the spirit of 1789, i.e. from the idea of the self-determination and sovereignty of the nation. Cultural nationalism, in contrast, was a striving for national individuality, characteristic of anti-Enlightenment German thought.