Between civic and ethnic nationalism

Ðàçìåùåíî íà http://www.allbest.ru/

Between civic and ethnic nationalism

Tomasz Kamusella

The article examines the emergence and use of the idea of dichotomy between civil and ethnic nationalism. Based on the following analysis, the suggestion is made that civilian nationalism also has an ethnic character. This leads to the conclusion that civilian nationalism should be considered as a subcategory of ethnic nationalism. This somewhat reduces the effectiveness of using dichotomy as a heuristic analysis tool, but one must take into account the inherent limitations. The rooted nature of civil dichotomy against ethnic nationalism is so strong today that it does not allow us to see the obvious. Under “obvious” it is meant the normative nature of both concepts. The fact that most researchers still consider ethnic nationalism “bad” and civilian “good” leads to a neglect of critical thinking, as the result of which, at best, we get a biased analysis. Quite often civilian nationalism is perceived as an indicator of democracy and stability, and ethnic nationalism is of conflict and chaos.

Keywords: civic vs ethnic nationalism dichotomy, civic nationalism, discourse analysis, ethnic nationalism, typology of nationalisms.

Êàìóçåëëà T. ̳æ ãðîìàäñüêèì òà åòí³÷íèì íàö³îíàë³çìîì.

Ó ñòàòò³ äîñë³äæóºòüñÿ âèíèêíåííÿ òà âèêîðèñòàííÿ ³äå¿ äèõîòî쳿 ì³æ ãðîìàäÿíñüêèì òà åòí³÷íèì íàö³îíàë³çìîì. Âèõîäÿ÷è ç íàñòóïíîãî àíàë³çó, ïðîïîíóºòüñÿ òåçà ïðî òå, ùî ãðîìàäÿíñüêèé íàö³îíàë³çì òàêîæ ìຠåòí³÷íèé õàðàêòåð. Öå ïðèçâîäèòü äî âèñíîâêó, ùî ãðîìàäÿíñüêèé íàö³îíàë³çì âàðòî ðîçãëÿäàòè ÿê ï³äêàòåãîð³þ åòí³÷íîãî íàö³îíàë³çìó. Öå äåùî çìåíøóº åôåêòèâí³ñòü âèêîðèñòàííÿ äèõîòî쳿 ÿê åâðèñòè÷íîãî ³íñòðóìåíòó àíàë³çó, îäíàê âàðòî âðàõîâóâàòè âëàñòèâ³ ¿é îáìåæåííÿ. Âêîð³íåíèé õàðàêòåð äèõîòî쳿 ãðîìàäÿíñüêîãî ïðîòè åòí³÷íîãî íàö³îíàë³çìó íèí³ íàñò³ëüêè ñèëüíèé, ùî íå äîçâîëÿº íàì áà÷èòè î÷åâèäíå. Ï³ä «î÷åâèäíèì» ðîçó쳺òüñÿ íîðìàòèâíèé õàðàêòåð îáîõ ïîíÿòü. Òîé ôàêò, ùî á³ëüø³ñòü äîñë³äíèê³â âñå ùå ââàæàþòü åòí³÷íèé íàö³îíàë³çì «ïîãàíèì», à ãðîìàäÿíñüêèé - «õîðîøèì», ïðèçâîäèòü äî ³ãíîðóâàííÿ êðèòè÷íîãî ìèñëåííÿ, âíàñë³äîê ÷îãî, ó êðàùîìó âèïàäêó îòðèìóºìî íåîá'ºêòèâíèé àíàë³ç. Äîñèòü ÷àñòî ãðîìàäÿíñüêèé íàö³îíàë³çì ñïðèéìàºòüñÿ ÿê ïîêàçíèê äåìîêðàò³¿ òà ñòàá³ëüíîñò³, à åòí³÷íèé íàö³îíàë³çì - êîíôë³êòó òà õàîñó.

Êëþ÷îâ³ ñëîâà: äèõîòîì³ÿ ãðîìàäÿíñüêîãî ïðîòè åòí³÷íîãî íàö³îíàë³çìó, ãðîìàäÿíñüêèé íàö³îíàë³çì, àíàë³ç äèñêóðñó, åòí³÷íèé íàö³îíàë³çì, òèïîëîã³ÿ íàö³îíàë³çìó.

Êàìóçåëëà Ò. Ìåæäó ãðàæäàíñêèì è ýòíè÷åñêèì íàöèîíàëèçìîì.

 ñòàòüå èññëåäóåòñÿ âîçíèêíîâåíèå è èñïîëüçîâàíèå èäåè äèõîòîìèè ìåæäó ãðàæäàíñêèì è ýòíè÷åñêèì íàöèîíàëèçìîì. Èñõîäÿ èç ïîñëåäóþùåãî àíàëèçà, ïðåäëàãàåòñÿ òåçèñ î òîì, ÷òî ãðàæäàíñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì òàêæå èìååò ýòíè÷åñêèé õàðàêòåð. Ýòî ïðèâîäèò ê âûâîäó, ÷òî ãðàæäàíñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì ñëåäóåò ðàññìàòðèâàòü êàê ïîäêàòåãîðèþ ýòíè÷åñêîãî íàöèîíàëèçìà. Ýòî íåñêîëüêî ñíèæàåò ýôôåêòèâíîñòü èñïîëüçîâàíèÿ äèõîòîìèè êàê ýâðèñòè÷åñêîãî èíñòðóìåíòà àíàëèçà, îäíàêî ñëåäóåò ó÷èòûâàòü ïðèñóùèå åé îãðàíè÷åíèÿ. Óêîðåí¸ííûé õàðàêòåð äèõîòîìèè ãðàæäàíñêîãî ïðîòèâ ýòíè÷åñêîãî íàöèîíàëèçìà ñåé÷àñ íàñòîëüêî ñèëåí, ÷òî íå ïîçâîëÿåò íàì âèäåòü î÷åâèäíîå. Ïîä «î÷åâèäíûì» ïîíèìàåòñÿ íîðìàòèâíûé õàðàêòåð îáîèõ ïîíÿòèé. Òîò ôàêò, ÷òî áîëüøèíñòâî èññëåäîâàòåëåé âñå åùå ñ÷èòàþò ýòíè÷åñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì «ïëîõèì», à ãðàæäàíñêèé - «õîðîøèì», ïðèâîäèò ê èãíîðèðîâàíèþ êðèòè÷åñêîãî ìûøëåíèÿ, â ðåçóëüòàòå ÷åãî, â ëó÷øåì ñëó÷àå ïîëó÷àåì íåîáúåêòèâíûé àíàëèç. Äîñòàòî÷íî ÷àñòî ãðàæäàíñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì âîñïðèíèìàåòñÿ êàê ïîêàçàòåëü äåìîêðàòèè è ñòàáèëüíîñòè, à ýòíè÷åñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì - êîíôëèêòà è õàîñà.

Êëþ÷åâûå ñëîâà:äèõîòîìèÿ ãðàæäàíñêîãî ïðîòèâ ýòíè÷åñêîãî íàöèîíàëèçìà, ãðàæäàíñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì, äèñêóðñèâíûé àíàëèç, ýòíè÷åñêèé íàöèîíàëèçì, òèïîëîãèÿ íàöèîíàëèçìà.

Analyzing Dogmas

dichotomy civic ethnic nationalism

The initially arcane subject of civic and ethnic nationalism, previously confined to professional scholars of nationalism, has become commonplace in everyday conversations on matters political [1, 2]. It is enough to open a newspaper or to listen to the news to hear the terms crop up in interviews and commentaries [3, 4, 5].

The dogma is that turning from ethnic toward civic nationalism as a state's organizing and legitimizing principle is good: good for stability, good for the economy, and, above all, good for democracy. By the same token of this binary opposition, ethnic nationalism is seen as a (if not the) root cause of political instability, of wars, of faltering economies and of the generalized failure to achieve democracy in any particular polity.

As is generally the case with received knowledge, once a dogma has been propagated and internalized, people cease to question it. It is repeated time and again as a mantra, the articulation of which alone is supposed to change the reality at hand. But it is falling for the charm of puffs of hot air, which is all that spoken words amount to, ultimately. Yet formulas, no matter how often they may be evoked, are inert artifacts, incapable of changing anything by themselves. People, who alone can actualize such dogmas, formulas or tenets, are required to carry their purpose into effect.

The problem is that in order to realize a principle in practice, people must agree on what they understand by a given tenet. However, dogmas, by their very nature, are frequently opaque and difficult to analyze, due to their propensity for becoming “received knowledge”, which with time is seen as “real truth”, not requiring critical scrutiny. The widespread articulation of dogmas in public discourse makes them appear obvious, uncontested and explicit. As I attempt to show in this essay, there is much left unsaid on the opposition between civic and ethnic nationalism regarding its origin, the underlying assumptions (or axioms) and the dynamics of the employment of this categorical opposition in 20^th-century politics and intellectual discourse. This dichotomy has been usefully analyzed and criticized by many [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. However, in contrast to these studies I focus on the ontological relation between civic and ethnic nationalism as concepts, and propose that the former may (or even should?) be seen as a subcategory of the latter.

In order to probe into the veritable dark matter (or tacit knowledge [11, p. 3-52]) of the dichotomy, it is necessary first to delve into the history of the idea and its (ab)uses.

Inventing the Dichotomy

The first classificatory intimation on the presumed dual nature of nationalism dates back to 1908, when the historian Friedrich Meinecke's (1862-1854) oft-reprinted study Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaatescame off the press in the German Empire. (It was published in an English translation in 1970.) In this monograph he introduced the terms Staatsnation (state-nation) and Kulturnation (culture-nation), which he opposed to each other, thus creating a binary opposition between them, a dichotomy. These two notions and the dichotomy constructed from them are the intellectual instruments through which the intertwined concepts of civic and ethnic nationalism are still expressed in the German language, as attested by the Bohemian-West German sociologist Eugen Lemberg's (1903-1976) popular study Nationalismus[12, s. 16, 51, 88, 143, 299].

Drawing on Meinecke's dichotomy, the American-Jewish-Bohemian historian, now considered the “father of the study of nationalism”, Hans Kohn (1891-1971), spoke of political and cultural nationalism [13, p. 111]. In his earlier books on nationalism in the Middle East and in the Soviet Union, he had suggested that nationalism in the West is somehow different from nationalism in the non-Western areas of the world [14, 15]. Thus Kohn wrote about “Western nationalism” and “nationalism outside the Western world” [13, p. 329-331, 352]. It was his student, the German-American historian Louis Snyder (1907-1993), who built on his teacher's insights and connected these two strands into a hard dichotomy of “Western nationalism” as opposed to “non-Western nationalism”. He attributed features that today we label as “civic” to the former, and “ethnic” features to the latter. However, Snyder did not yet use the adjectives “civic” or “ethnic”, when qualifying these two types of nationalism [16, p. 118-120].

In 1973 the British-Montenegrin political philosopher John Plamenatz (1912-1975) proposed that “Western nationalism” is liberal, inclusive and, thus, benign [17]. He opposed it to nasty, illiberal, dangerous (ethnic) “Eastern nationalism”, which he identified with the nationalisms of the Balkan nation-states. In this, Plamenatz added a clear ethical/normative dimension to the coalescing dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, which was largely implicit in Kohn's and Snyder's works. In the 1980s the concept was already “in the air” of Western intellectual discourse, before Snyder ironed it out in the detailed enumeration of the diametrically opposed (according to him) features of “good Western nationalism” and “bad Eastern nationalism” [18, p. 173].

Although Kohn did not employ the adjectives “civic” and “ethnic” to qualify the two kinds of nationalism, the latter had already been used in 1950 to brand “Eastern nationalism” by the Austro-American historian of the Habsburg monarchy Robert A. Kann (1906-1981) [19, p. 10]. The coinage “civic nationalism” gained currency much later, in the 1970s and 1980s. One of its first users was Snyder [20, p. xiii], who nevertheless failed to pair it with “ethnic nationalism”, though the latter collocation did occur elsewhere in the same volume [20, p. 107]. This pairing was achieved by the British-German-Austrian historian Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917-2012) in his renowned work on nationalism Nations and Nationalism since 1780 [21]. In that book he spoke about “political nationalism” [21, p. 45] and “ethnic nationalism” [21, p. 63], clearly linking them to Meinecke's German- language opposition between the political and the cultural. Furthermore, in the case of political nationalism, Hobsbawm characterized it as having a “civic-national dimension” [21, p. 45] paving the way for the replacement of “political” with “civic” in the collocation “political nationalism”.

In the 1990s the reassertion of the “national” over the non-national “socialist” or “internationalist” was dramatically illustrated by the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and the dramatic breakups of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia into successor states, invariably of an ethnonational character. These events gave much currency to the dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, making it appear to be the most apt description and categorization of all nationalisms across the globe [22, 23, 24].

The (West) German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929-), reacting to the same events, reinforced this line of thinking, by introducing the concept of civic nationalism to German discourse in the concept of Verfassungspatriotismus (“constitutional patriotism”), as opposed to the political forces then at work in Europe's newly postcommunist states [25]. These forces were identified as Ethnonationalismus(“ethnonationalism”)by the Swiss historian

Urs Altermatt (1942-) in his heartfelt treatise written in reaction to the shock of the post-Yugoslav wars [26].

Thus, the dogma was born.

Colonizing the Mind

The divide between civic and ethnic nationalism is so deep because influential scholars and intellectuals employing these categories for research have made it so. In turn, the public interested in the issues adopted this distinction, as shaped by the literati, together with its binary opposition between the two ideal (idealized?) kinds of nationalism, posited as two starkly opposed poles which were sometimes ethically or morally colored. In accordance with this line of thinking, a nation-state can be categorized as “civic” or “ethnic”, without much - if any - middle ground between the two types being conceded. When this or that categorization of social reality becomes popular and is adopted by scholars and public opinion, people - willy-nilly - begin to perceive reality through its lens. But each lens, while improving the visibility of a place or object from a specific angle, also limits and distorts the field of vision, in its own unique manner. Obviously, this insight originated in the uncertainty principle in the field of quantum physics [27].

The act of observing, interpreting and analyzing the social and the political spheres through the instrument of a pet categorization, necessarily changes and transforms social reality in agreement with categories employed by the perceiver. It becomes, to a degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is especially so when the intellectual elite and the mass media employ a given categorization as a matter of course. Such a stamp of approval makes it part and parcel of everyday discourse on political, economic and social issues. Not surprisingly, the received categories of thinking cease to be awkward or novel, as they would have been only a short time prior to their elevation to the rank of the conventional wisdom. Thus they become internalized by the population at large. In the process these categories become transparent, as their users do not consciously notice them any longer, when speaking and commenting on social reality [28, p. 160-183; 218-245].

In the same manner, when people talk, they rarely think about the history of concepts or the etymological origins of words and phrases, let alone about syntax, phonemes or word formation. For language to work as the medium of communication, one must use it without thinking about it. Automatism kicks in. The same is true, for instance, of walking. In order to be able to walk, one needs simply to walk, rather than ponder how the legs, feet and joints must be moved in conjunction with one another and, simultaneously, the balance of the body maintained to make the very act of walking possible. Being self-conscious about walking might stop one in one's tracks and perhaps send one tumbling down to the ground.

Obviously, introspection comes more easily in the case of discourse, but still it is a minority pursuit. Thinking about thinking, meta-thinking, appeals only to a few, mostly philosophers. It deprives discourse of its socially-induced spontaneity and vibrancy, stemming the fertile and reciprocal flow of views and ideas among discussants to a sparse trickle of words commenting on the choice and employment of words commonly used for arguing about an element of social or material reality. Public opinion as created and fed by the mass media thrives thanks to this lack of self-reflexivity. Newspapers and television channels that aspire to the inclusion of the “esoteric” dimension in their reporting invariably lose the interest of the mass reader and viewer and become elite or specialized purveyors of information (provided they can survive such financially near-suicidal tactics).

Why condemn yourself to this ascetic diet? Well, thinking in terms of the ethically colored opposition between civic and ethnic nationalism lets the wielders of this categorization group nation-states into “better ones” and “worse ones”. The primary coiners and wielders of this categorization were scholars from “the West,' meaning Western Europe (or actually, Britain and France) and North America (that is, Canada and the United States), who, of course, included their own nation-states in the set of “good” civic national polities [29].

Next, they turned their gaze eastward, where the two World Wars and the two totalitarianisms of national socialism and communism wreaked havoc. Prior to 1989, this “distasteful” part of Europe (or rather of Eurasia) was near-hermetically sealed by the Iron Curtain, and thus “safely” isolated from “good” Europe. The Western perceivers located the imagined bad other, or “ethnic” nation-states, in this no-go zone [23]. Isolation came in handy for securing the success of this attribution, as hardly anyone from across the barrier would answer back, or was even in a position to do so.

The echo of weak dissenting voices from the other side could not make a dent in the West's dogmatic perception of the world. Complacency set in. Another received concept was born. The end of communism followed by the successive breakups of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia seemed to reconfirm the assigning of nation-states into civic and ethnic categories [30]. Scholars from postcommunist states faced with the breakups and/or economic collapses of their own polities, tended to adopt this Western diagnosis, and sought to advocate the replacement of the ethnic with the civic in the case of their home states' respective nationalisms [31]. Dissenting voices were few and far between, and they failed to make their message widely heard. For instance, the Polish historian Marek Waldenberg's (1926-) harsh criticism of the West's complicity in destroying Yugoslavia went largely unnoticed [32].

Western concepts developed to think about the West's other(s) were cast in the role of seemingly objective categories of analysis to be applied worldwide in what was tantamount to intellectual imperialism. It is - as the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said (1935-2003) proposed - a case of orientalism, or the West's “easternization of the East”. Using it, the image of the East - or even more broadly - the “Rest” can be made to coincide with the West's stereotypical or mythologized picture of this area of the globe [33]. Not that a reversal of this process - occidentalism - is impossible, but its influence on the global discourse was rather negligible until the beginning of the 21^st century [34]. The Francophone writer from Djibouti, Abdourahman Waberi (1965-) has imagined a fictional marginalization of Europe vis-à-vis a burgeoning Africa [35], but this has not been seen as anything more than an intellectual game. However things may change. Wasn't Europe once the poor relation of the Caliphate or of China?

Going Dutch

The internalization of the opposition of civic vs ethnic nationalism (especially, in the West) often showed in the popular parlance that confined the very existence of nationalism to the “Rest”. In contrast, in the West, the supposed realm of democracy, rationality and objectivism, there was no nationalism. Individualism was to prevail over group thinking and acting, and over collectivism. Famously, in 1987 the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pronounced that “There is no such thing as society” [36]. But in 1995 the British social psychologist Michael Billig (1947-) “rediscovered” nationalism in the West by analyzing its workings at the “banal” level of everyday rituals of which little notice is taken, consigning it to intellectual and social invisibility [37].

A similar rhetorical disappearing act was applied to “bad ethnic nationalism” in Central and Eastern Europe. Intellectuals and politicians in the region's ethnolinguistic nation-states propose that their respective polities' nationalisms cannot be seen as anything else but “patriotism”, which by default is “good”. And they tend to brand the neighboring states' patriotisms with the pejorative label of “nationalism”. In the Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Russian languages, “nationalism” is not one concept among others. It is invariably negatively colored and opposed to the positively colored term “patriotism”. In the area's languages there is no neutral term to speak about the ideology of nationalism, no middle ground: in Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary quip, “he who is not with us is against us” [38, p. 703].

This Central and Eastern European pair of oppositions, nationalism vs patriotism, seems to be a close counterpart of the West's claim of “no nationalism” at home vs “nationalism” everywhere else, or in the Rest. Both pairs of oppositions seem to cover the same semantic fields as those marked by the conceptual tension between civic and ethnic nationalism.

And again, the story looks different when the perceiver changes and the probing eye falls on a different part of the world. During the Cold War, both the gaze cast by the West and that cast by the Eastern (Soviet) bloc in the direction of the world's other areas, grouped into the now half-forgotten category of the “Third World” [39], tended to deny that there was any nationalism there. Nationalism could exist only in the “developed world”, equated with the West and the East, or the “First and Second Worlds”, even if those two happened to be at loggerheads. Decolonization and the Cold War division of the world created a plethora of new polities, which did not belong either to the West or to the East. They were consigned to the novel geopolitical space of the “developing world”. The developed world openly or tacitly denied to the developing states the status of genuine nation-states, though the postcolonial polities themselves emulated the model of the nation-state as practiced either in the East or the West. Hans Kohn's thesis on the globalization of nationalism, or the new global era of sameness in the political organization of the world as heralded by decolonization, fell on deaf ears [40].

The predictable rise of counter-national movements within and across the borders in former colonies that had been hastily bundled out of the Western empires into unprepared independence was branded by outside - that is, Western or Eastern - commentators as “tribalism” in Africa [41] and “communalism” in Asia [42]. These forces were presented as endangering the “national integration” of the postcolonial polities [43]. And again, the semantic fields of “national integration”, on the one hand, and of “tribalism” and “communalism”, on the other, appear to correspond closely to those of civic and ethnic nationalism, respectively.

When (regional or sub-state) national movements appear within the West's nationstates, they are brushed aside with a euphemism. The interesting case in point is that of the United Kingdom's Northern Ireland where the civil war of 1969-1998 became known as “the Troubles”, and the warring parties were said to be engaged in “communal violence” [44, p. 32]. It was as if the term “communalism”, borrowed from post-Partition India, was better suited to disguise the unbecoming “ethnic” nature of events that by definition had no right to occur in the West. They were, after all, “typical of the East”. The Scottish-British political scientist Tom Naim's (1932-) assertion that ethnic nationalisms are at work in the United Kingdom took more than three decades to sink in [45].

A Heuristic Instrument of Analysis

In Naim's book these nationalisms were additionally qualified as “neonationalisms”. Nowadays the term “neonationalism” or “new nationalism” [23] seems to pose the use of ethnicity in the West for nation-building ends as a novel phenomenon, perhaps, an “import from the East”. This is not far from the traditional denial of (ethnic) nationalism in the West, though some scholars began to speak of neonationalisms as a worldwide phenomenon [46].

It does not seem practical to postulate doing away with the use of the civic vs ethnic nationalism distinction, whatever its faults. Simply put, the faults should be borne in mind, like those of all human concepts. Language is not a map of reality but a kit of conceptual tools to probe into it. Furthermore, the number of these tools is limited by the retrieval capacity of the human mind, whereas their kinds are decided by human needs and priorities that constantly change. Specific tools are devised to meet these changing priorities.

In Western thought, the tradition of analyzing reality in terms of binary oppositions has been long established, and will not disappear overnight. And even when it is replaced by a different manner of conceptualization in the future, the new way of thinking will be beset by other (as yet unknown) problems and inherent limitations. These deficiencies, too, will be caused by the limited nature of human language and mind.

In 1981, two Czech scholars Jaroslav Krejci (1916-2014) and Vitezslav Velimsky in their English-language work Ethnic and Political Nations in Europe valiantly scaled the intellectual barrier reinforced by the Iron Curtain in thinking about nationalism in the West and the East. They convincingly showed that “political” (that is, civic) elements are present in ethnic nationalisms, and that, vice versa, ethnic elements are present in civic nationalisms; the actual mixture of these elements varied from case to case [47].

Hence, when employing the terms civic and ethnic nationalism in an analysis, it may be more advisable and practical to see them as a continuum of variously combined ethno-civic scenarios extending between the ideal (and thus never attained) poles of “pure” civic and ethnic nationalism. In the analyzed case of a given nationalism, the civic element may prevail over the ethnic or the other way round. Moreover, the prevalence of one over the other may change markedly over time. But, taken in the round, it is unrealistic to expect a nationalism to be exclusively civic, or to be ethnic through and through.

Looking Askance: Can Civic Nationalism Be Ethnic?

Providers and guarantors of citizenship - ergo, the basis of civic nationalism - are states. All the extant states today are nation-states, due to the unprecedented globalization of nationalism as the sole ideology of statehood legitimization. The 1991 disappearance of the late twentieth-century world's only important non-national polity, the Soviet Union, sundered into successor nation-states, thus completed the globalization of nationalism. It became the single universally accepted “infrastructural” ideology of statehood construction, legitimization and maintenance across the entire globe. It is equally aspired to and practised by states as diverse as Britain, China, Ecuador, Montenegro, Iran, Papua New Guinea, or Qatar.

It appears logical then that in the case of non-state nationalisms that cannot furnish members of their nations with citizenship, such nationalisms can - or even must - be classified as ethnic. But non-state national movements, when successful, thus gain polities for their nations, or at least, autonomous regions within already existing states. It is their ultimate goal. The foundational tenet of nationalism being that each human group recognized as a nation enjoys the inalienable right to its own nationstate, it writes the desire for statehood into the core of this ideology. It was recognized as such after World War I by the worldwide acceptance of “national selfdetermination” as one of the most important principles of international law.

Nationalism, in its essence, is about state-building and statehood legitimization, not about constructing a people and winning recognition for it as a nation. It is an intermediary stage. Obviously, some national movements never leave this anteroom to statehood, because, as research shows, there are always more national movements and nations aspiring to statehood than polities or uncontested territory available for realizing their political dreams. Likewise, there are more human groups that potentially could become nations or declare themselves as such than actually set out on this path of nation-building. This statehood desire written into nationalism ensures an element of civic-ness in stateless nationalisms. Tellingly, in the 19^th century, ideologues of the then stateless Czech national movement qualified their nationalism with the adjective stätoprävni(“state-cum-legal”) [48, s. 30, 108]. Similarly, their Polish counterparts called their stateless nationalism panstwowo-historyczny (“state- cum-historic”) [49, s. 210], while Croatian parties employed the terms drzavno pravo (“state law/right”) and povijesno pravo (“historic law/right”) to the same effect [50; 51, s. 366].

Furthermore, though politically and ideologically useful, the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism appears misleading [6, p. 24-28]. As remarked above, “civic-ness” has its roots in the institution of citizenship. What about ethnicity? This concept denotes the use of different elements of culture and their varying configurations for human group building and the maintenance of difference (“ethnic boundaries”) between such groups [52]. This process of group construction requires that (at least at a notional level) all the members of a given “group under construction” adopt and practice all their lives the group's specific “cultural fingerprint”. It becomes one's identity, and simultaneously binds one with others into this very group.

The larger a group, the less onerous and complicated its cultural common denominator must be, in order to prevent its Assuring into smaller groups. Time and again language has proved quite successful in this role, because apart from being the badge of difference, it is simultaneously the basic and most prevalent medium of communication among humans. This tie binds surprisingly tightly, but not absolutely, as amply proved by the existence of plurilingual nations (for instance, the quadrilingual Swiss or the trilingual Luxembourgers) or of different nations speaking the same languages, for instance, the Austrians and the Germans speaking German, or the Australians and the Canadians speaking English.

Religion may function similarly to language by creating a community of shared values and customs. A given set of such transcendentally justified values explains, perpetuates and legitimizes the group's way of life, be it the Buddhist Thais, the Catholic Mexicans, the Muslim Malays, or the atheist (indifferent to any religion) Czechs. It does not, however, preclude the possibility of polyreligious groups, like those of the Catholic-Protestant Germans, the Muslim-Orthodox Kazakhstanis, or the majority of the simultaneously Shinto and Buddhist individuals in Japan.

A hearty dose of good luck combined with their specific system of writing allowed the Chinese to preserve their unity as a group for an exceptionally long time. The world's longest continuous dual tradition of statehood and literacy, spanning more than three millennia, has undeniably worked strongly in favor of the centripetal forces holding society and state together [53]. In 2002 the Russian Duma took their cue - perhaps - from this, by forbidding the use of any script other than Cyrillic for writing and publishing in the languages native to the territory of the Russian Federation [54, p. 132-133].

The narcissism of small differences is difficult to oppose and overcome. When a sizeable subset of persons, usually concentrated in a specific region within a polity or on a territory compactly inhabited by an ethnic group, begin to see themselves as different from the rest, and the view persists for a couple of generations, then a new group tends to coalesce. Scholars, especially from the Soviet Union, came to refer to the process as “ethnogenesis” (from the Greek for “the birth of a human/ethnic group”) [55, 56, 57].

The usual response to this tendency is to settle for a lower (or different) common denominator, agreed upon and acceptable to all the interested parties, in order to preserve the continued undivided existence of a group. The Swiss nation has been a successful instance of this process, the common denominator ensuring in their case the prevalence of the centripetal pull preserving the existing state against the centrifugal forces of the linguistic diversity (four official languages) and of Switzerland's traditional duo-confessionalism (Catholicism and Protestantism). Great Britain faced a similar prospect of breakup due to religious and ethnolinguistic differences, made palpable by the long good-bye (1922-1949) in the course of which southern Ireland became the independent Republic of Ireland; the United Kingdom embarked on successive rounds of “devolution” or quasi-federalization, and reluctant asymmetric federalization [45]. However, after the close 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, it remains to be seen whether the union will survive another referendum of this kind, the possibility of which looms on the horizon following the Brexit vote in 2016. The Scots voted to remain in the European Union, while the English, North Irish and Welsh to leave. In this process United Kingdom's state-wide British national identity seems to have disappeared for good.

The common denominator that binds together the Swiss, the British or, especially, the “American” nation of the United States is citizenship (widely known in Britain until recently as being a royal “subject”). This institution invented in Greek city- states [58], and gradually adopted across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire [59, p. 6-40], has been responsible for a lot of political heavy lifting across the modern world from the mid-20^th century to this day. It is the most widespread common denominator of group-formation, legitimization and maintenance within the extant nation-states nowadays. Apart from Central and Eastern Europe and some areas in Asia, citizenship dominates in this role on all the other continents.

But living together for a few generations under the roof of the same polity spawns customs, rules (formal and informal), and a shared vision of national history, among other things held in common. These elements amount to a common pattern of culture. This civic-generated pattern is not much different from the ethnic ones other human groups have arrived at through, for example, shared language and religion, before gaining their own nation-states. Hence, the nationalisms of Argentina, Nigeria or the United States may be as ethnic as those of Japan, Poland or Turkmenistan [60; 61, s. 300; 62]. And by the same token, the nationalisms of the latter group of polities, popularly seen as exemplars of undiluted ethnicity, may in practice be as “civic” as the national ideologies of the former group of states, which are generally applauded for being paragons of civic-ness.

It is all a matter of degree, spread along the civic-ethnic continuum.Or is it? Why oppose citizenship to ethnicity at all? If ethnicity is a pattern of culture, a bricolageof elements thought up and produced by humans, and adopted by them as the basis of their group identity, why see citizenship as somehow fundamentally different from ethnicity? Citizenship is also part of culture. The concept and its practices emerged in a specific place at a specific time. Before the 19^th century, the institution of citizenship seems to have been confined to Europe. Subsequently, its spread across the world was channeled through the conduit of the European powers' colonial empires [63, p. 278]. So citizenship is as much a sign of the increasingly globalized Westernization of the world as is the parallel spread of nationalism.

From the global perspective, nationalists found citizenship to be a useful, arguably the most useful, common denominator for building their nations and nation-states. This was so during the first half of the 19^th century in the Americas, and beginning in the mid-20^th century everywhere else, apart from Central and Eastern Europe and some areas of Asia. As a product of human culture, citizenship is not then radically different from language, religion, the idea of history, a set of symbols, ceremonies, or a way of life. All of these phenomena are products of culture, invented and practiced by humans.

Hence, on the plane of conceptual analysis not subjected to any political needs, I propose that citizenship is as much ethnic as all the other products of culture when employed for group building, legitimization and maintenance. Does this conclusion obliterate the dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism? Strictly and logically speaking, yes, it does. But on the pragmatic plane, because it has become such an ingrained element of political discourse and the meta-discourse on the political and the social in today's world, it should rather be retained.

Humans cannot think without words and concepts, however fallible and inexact these may be. Many of these concepts and words can be readily debunked in a manner similar to that which I employed for the analysis of the “civic vs ethnic nationalism” dichotomy in this article. However, striking such concepts or words out of dictionaries and from discourse would not do much good, especially if there are no better alternatives available to fall back on. The very discourse hinges on these concepts and words; without them there cannot be anything else but utter silence on these topics. In any case, denying the use of words and concepts to a population at large by official fiat is very difficult, if not impossible. For a measure of success in such an onerous exercise of socio-intellectual engineering, one would need the indispensible tool of a totalitarian system, which - fortunately for the population at large - is extremely costly and devilishly difficult to muster for a prolonged period of time.

It is more practical to propose that scholars using the terms civic and ethnic nationalism for their research could make sure not to take them for granted, and that they should be aware that the concepts analyze a subject matter as much as they coshape it, alongside the very analysis. This approach can help prevent succumbing to the allure of received knowledge, as presented by the seemingly obvious meaning and character of both the concepts and of the dynamics of the semantic and discourse relationship between them.

And indeed, what is the relationship between civic and ethnic nationalism if we accept that civic nationalism is ethnic, too? In this line of thinking, civic nationalism is a subcategory of ethnic nationalism. In analytical value and usefulness, it is on a par with other similar categories, such as linguistic or religious nationalism. In essence, each nationalism appears to be ethnic. Nationalism itself is an ethnic phenomenon, a product of human culture, not of nature.

Postscriptum

Rereading this article for publication in summer 2017, I could not help a feeling that the above conclusion leaves the reader somewhat short-changed. Indeed, humans are unable to think beyond or outwith language. It is a truism. And, yes, in strict sociocultural and semantic analysis civic nationalism is ethnic in its character, as well. Categorizations of concepts are as invented as concepts, words and languages themselves. It is humans who decide what is logical or not, and which term is broader or narrower, higher or lower. So what? Is this insight about civic nationalism being a subcategory of ethnic nationalism of any significance for social scientists or politicians?

The ingrained nature of the civic vs ethnic nationalism dichotomy is so strong nowadays that it prevents us from seeing the obvious. By “the obvious” I mean the value-laden normative character of both concepts. The fact that most commentators still see ethnic nationalism as “bad” and its civic counterpart as inherently “good” puts critical thinking on autopilot, resulting in faulty or, at best, lazy analyses. For instance, quite often civic nationalism is seen as a good predictor of democracy and stability, while ethnic nationalism of conflict and volatility.

But if civic nationalism is a sure sign of democracy and good governance, why is it so that Belarus happens to be a dictatorship? One can say that this nation-state is ethnic, not civic, but the rapid 1990s withering of the Belarusian language and culture in the role of the carriers of Belarusianness, left Belarusian citizenship largely alone to shoulder this responsibility. Well, Nigeria or Mexico are indubitably civic nationstates but are not known as paragons of democracy. On the other hand, such through and through ethnic nation-states as Sweden or the Czech Republic excel at democracy and governance.

The British-Polish sociologist and philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), famously intuited that genocide is a clear sign of modernity [64]. That modernity enables it and maybe even makes periodic outbreaks of genocide-scale violence inevitable. The two arguably most horrific instances of genocide during the second half of the 20^th century took place in Cambodia in 1975-1979 and in Rwanda in 1994. The former is an ethnic nation-state for the nation of Khmer-speakers. On the contrary, Rwanda is a postcolonial civic nation-state built for the civic nation of Rwandans, despite the fact that from the ethnic perspective they may be identified as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa.

At present the world's two largest (“most successful”) economies are housed in the civic national polity of the United States and in the ethnic nation-state of China. On the other hand, during the last two decades the economic situation of the population and the state has been dismal in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and rather poor in the postcommunist Russian Federation. The latter polity is increasingly remodelled as an ethnic nation-state, while the former is a self-declared civic polity. Hence, the state of economy is not correlated with the dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism, either.

Unlike once proposed and often still maintained, civic-ness and ethnicity do not seem to predict whether a state tends toward either democracy or dictatorship, stability or mass violence, economic prosperity or collapse. It is the main methodological message of this article. Stability, prosperity and democracy are dependent on a wider array of factors than the over-simplistic dichotomy of ethnic and civic nationalism alone, while contingency (a polite term for human folly) is a great leveler, always in the offing to nullify any regularity that a scholar may discover. Researchers in the field of the social sciences should bear in mind that a given set of factors that produced a desirable outcome in a polity at a given time, may not produce the same desirable outcome elsewhere or in a different period.

What the social sciences can provide by the way of prediction is limited to shortterm localized tendencies. It is so because there are no ironclad laws of history or sociology.

References

1. Civic vs. Ethnic Nationalism. [Åëåêòðîííèé ðåñóðñ]. - Ðåæèìäîñòóïó: www.debate.org/forums/Politics/topic/2186/

2. Smith D. Ignatieffs World: A Liberal Leader for the 21st Century? - Toronto ONT: James Lorimer & Company Ltd, 2006. - 168 p.

3. Luckhurst T. A Fight for Scotland's Future // The Guardian. - 2008. [Åëåêòðîííèé ðåñóðñ]. -Ðåæèì äîñòóïó:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/15/scotland.labour?

INTCMP=SRCH

4. Hensman S. Telling the Truth about War // The Guardian. - 2009. [Åëåêòðîííèé ðåñóðñ]. - Ðåæèì äîñòóïó: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jan/19/war-srilanka-israel -joumalism?INTCMP=SRCH

5. Mencwel A. Inny patriotyzm Ivana Czolovicia // Gazeta Wyborcza. - 2010. [Åëåêòðîííèé ðåñóðñ]. - Ðåæèì äîñòóïó:http://wyborcza.pl/1,86741,7939730,Inny_patriotyzm_Ivana_

Czolovicia.html

6. Kuzio T. The Myth of the Civic State: A Critical Survey of Hans Kohn's Framework for Understanding Nationalism // Ethnic and Racial Studies. - 2002. - Vol. 25. - No. 1. - P. 20-39.

7. Nikolas M.M. False Opposites in Nationalism: An Examination of the Dichotomy of Civic Nationalism and Ethnic Nationalism in Modern Europe. - Melbourne: Monash University, 1999. - (MA Thesis).

8. Pianko N. Did Kohn Believe in the “Kohn Dichotomy”? Reconsidering Kohn's Journey from The Political Idea of Judaism to the Idea of Nationalism // Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. - 2010. - Vol. 55 - P. 295-311.

9. Shevel O. The Post-Communist Diaspora Laws: Beyond the “Good Civic vs. Bad Ethnic” Nationalism Dichotomy // East European Politics and Societies. - 2010. - Vol. 24. - No. 1. - P. 159-187.

10. Shulman S. Challenging the Civic/Ethnic and West/East Dichotomies in the Study of Nationalism // Comparative Political Studies. - 2002. - Vol. 35. - No. 5. - P. 554-585.

11. Polanyi M. The Tacit Dimension. - Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2009. -

128 p.

12. Lemberg E. Nationalismus, 2 vols. - Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964.

13. Kohn H. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origins and Background. - New York: Macmillan, 1944. - 735 p.

14. Kohn H. A History of Nationalism in the East. - New York: Brace and Company, 1929. - 476 p.

15. Kohn H. Nationalism in the Soviet Union. - London: George Routledge & Son, 1933.

16. Snyder L. The Meaning of Nationalism. - New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. - 208 p.

17. Plamenatz J. Two Types of Nationalism // Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea / Ed. by E. Kamenka. - Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973. - P. 22-37.

18. Snyder L. Encyclopedia of Nationalism. - New York: Paragon House, 1990. - 445 p.

19. KannR.A. The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and the National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1918. - New York: Columbia University Press, 1950.

20. Snyder L. The New Nationalism. - NY: Routledge, 2003. - 410 p.

21. HobsbawmE.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. - 211 p.

22. Brown F.J. Hopes and Shadows: Eastern Europe after Communism. - Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1994. - 384 p.

23. Ignatieff M. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. - New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. - 276 p.

24. Schöpflin G. Nationalism and Ethnicity in Europe. East and West // Nationalism and the Nationalities in the New Europe / Ed. by C.A. Kupcham. - Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,

1995. - P. 37-65.

25. Habermas J. Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität. Überlegungen zur europäischen Zukunft. - St. Gallen: Erker, 1991. - 36 s.

26. Altermatt U. Das Fanal von Sarajevo. Ethnonationalismus in Europa. - Paderborn: Schöningh,

1996. - 288 s.

27. Heisenberg W. Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik // Zeitschrift für Physik. - 1927. - Vol. 43. - Nos. 3-4. - S. 172-198.

28. Burke P. A Social History of Knowledge. - Cambridge: Polity, 2000. - 268 p.

29. PickusN. True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism. - Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. - 274 p.

30. Kaplan R. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. - New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. - 307 p.

31. Colovic I. Balkany - terror kultury. - Wolowiec: Czame, 2007. - 176 s.

32. Waldenberg M. Rozbicie Jugoslawin Od separacji Slowenii do wojny kosowskiej. - Warsaw: Scholar, 2003. - 463 s.

33. Said E. Orientalism. - New York: Pantehon Books, 1978. - 368 p.

34. Buruma I., Margalit A. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. - New York: Penguin, 2005. - 176 p.

35. Waberi A.A. In the United States of Africa. - Lincoln NE: Bison Books, University Press of Nebraska, 2009. - 134 p.

36. Epitaph for the Eighties? “There is no such thing as society” // The Sunday Times. - 1987. [Åëåêòðîííèé ðåñóðñ]. - Ðåæèì äîñòóïó: http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm.

37. Billig M. Banal Nationalism. - London: Sage, 1995. - 208 p.

38. Fischer L. The Life of Lenin. - New York: Harper &Row, 1964. - 707 p.

39. Naipaul S. The Illusion of the Third World // An Unfinished Journey. - Oxford and Santa Barbara CA: Isis Large Print, 1986. - P. 36-48.

40. Kohn H. The Age of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History. - New York: Harper, 1962.

41. Stepp W.G. Tribalism: A Divisive Force in Nigeria's Political Stability. - College Park: University of Maryland, 1967. - (MA Thesis).

42. Kondo H. Socio-Religious and Political Aspects of Communalism in Modern India. - Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951. - (MA Thesis).

43. Bhardwaj K.K. Combating Communalism in India: Key to National Integration. - New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1993. - 157 p.

44. Dewar M. The British Army in Northern Ireland. - London: Arms and Armour Press, 1985. - 270 p.

45. Nairn T. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism. - London: NLB and Verso, 1977. - 368 p.

46. Gingrich A., Banks M. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. - Oxford and New York: Berghan Books, 2006. - 314 p.

47. Krejci J., Velimsky V. Ethnic and Political Nations in Europe. - London: Croom Helm, 1981.

48. Skarda V. Narodni strana svobodomyslna a jeji program. - Prague: Edvard Beaufort, 1897.

49. Grzybowski K. Ojczyzna, narod, panstwo. - Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1970. - 220 s.

50. AndrovicI. Habsburski dom ³ hrvatskodrzavnopravo. - Zagreb: NakladaurednistvaHrvatskogDnevnika, 1907. - 64 s.

51. Markus T. Hrvatski politicki pokret 1848-1849. godine: osnovna zbivanja i ideje. - Zagreb: Dom i svijet, 2000.

52. Barth F. Introduction // Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. - Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969. - P. 9-38.