The article discusses the importance of cultural and sociological strategies for a comparative study of national identification processes in the political and cultural space of contemporary Russia and the European community. The growing acuteness ofthe political positioning ofthese communities, associated with the growing 114 fragmentation of the global political order and the conflict nature of symbolic resources used by national elites, actualizes the development of sociological models of such sociocultural dynamics. The author emphasizes the importance of describing and theoretical analysis of the specific legitimation profiles of national memory, due to the sociocultural dynamics of its interrelated elements such as images of the past and future, the typology of the heroic, priority strategies and practices of symbolic construction of the enemy image and the "other" in domestic and foreign communications. The author offers a new theoretical approach to the research of the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary European and Russian national identity using cultural sociological analysis as a theoretical and methodological basis.