Like Kohn, some authors have been concerned primarily with characterizing the understandings of nationalism that have developed in different countries, or their consequences in terms of regime type or policy choices, including policies regulating civic incorporation of immigrants and their descendants (Greenfeld 1992; Brubaker 1992).11 Other authors, however, have applied the same categories to controversies within a particular country, or to making sense of current Western European political conflicts concerning immigration (Ignatieff 1993: 8–16; Brubaker 1992: 138–64; Jowitt 1992: 319–26). Thus, recent comparative and theoretical work on political membership has been characterized by a binary perspective that continues to owe much to Kohn’s dichotomy, even where the intellectual project is no longer a Kohnian comparative historical analysis, but instead the comparative mapping of ideological positions in domestic debates.
The “Civic Versus Ethnic” Perspective in Political Theory
Political theorists have also recently begun to examine the idea of “civic” or “liberal” nationalism. They have, however, been interested primarily in determining whether at least some forms of nationalism may be morally defensible, as the terms “civic” and “liberal” suggest, and if so, how commendable forms of nationalism may be distinguished from those to be condemned. Political theorists have therefore primarily examined the internal coherence of “civic” or “liberal” nationalism and the ethical arguments in its defense (e.g., Nielsen 1996–1997; Xenos 1996; Vincent 1997; Tamir 1993; Levinson 1995; Jennings 1992; Resnick 1992: 511–17; Lichtenberg 1996).
However, while increasingly engaged in debates about the value of liberal nationalism, political theorists have generally displayed little interest in gauging the heuristic value of the dichotomy between civic and ethnic, which is how comparativists principally use the dichotomy. Political theorists have devoted little attention to the Kohnian perspective’s usefulness or limitations as a framework for empirical investigation. Recent discussions of nationalism in the political theory literature have thus contributed little toward developing a framework for interpreting and comparing nationalist ideas, political movements, or conceptions of political community within or between countries. Relative to comparatively oriented researchers in sociology, political science, or history, political theorists have had little interest in how to characterize, distinguish, and classify the different ideas of political membership observable internationally. Consequently, despite the seeming convergence of theoretical attention around ideas of nationalism, across both subfields and disciplines, there has been troublingly little real intellectual connection between the work of political theorists and comparativists—whether political scientists, or sociologists or historians. These closely related areas of study, which should work together, instead mostly continue to talk past one another.
Limitations of the Existing Dichotomy of Civic and Ethnic
The contrast between civic and ethnic views of political membership is, unfortunately, unsatisfactory in a number of respects. Precisely by its dichotomous structure, this approach appears to be a clear and simple way of categorizing, and simultaneously evaluating, senses of nationhood and conceptions of political membership. However, superficial agreement in favor of “civic” or “liberal” forms and against the “ethnic” or “illiberal” ones actually conceals various theoretical confusions and apparent inconsistencies.
As the chapters that follow will show, the dichotomy of civic and ethnic is ill-suited for grasping the differences of perspective that structure today’s immigration-related controversies about political membership in liberal democracies. The dichotomy of civic and ethnic does not provide suitable terms for naming the different sides in these debates or identifying the theoretical differences that divide them. Even before looking to those debates, however, one must note some other important theoretical limitations of the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, which demonstrate the need for an alternative theoretical perspective.
Membership in a national cultural community is one of the most widely held ideas of what nationality is; yet there is a remarkable lack of theoretical consensus as to how this idea is to be classified. Some authors classify culturally defined nationhood as ethnic (e.g., Smith 1983: 215–18; Ignatieff 1993: 6–8; Breuilly 1982: 62, 113, 349). Others suggest, sometimes indirectly, that cultural definitions of the nation are, or can be, civic or liberal (Tamir 1993: 83–86, 166–67; Greenfeld 1992: 11–12; Nairn 1995: 103; Lind 1994: 94–98).12 Given the world-historical significance of culturally based definitions of nationhood, this is a significant divergence.
One might argue that the relevant question in deciding whether a given idea of nationhood is civic or ethnic is not whether membership in the nation is defined by members sharing a culture, but by whether it is assimilationist. On this view, the perspective of those believing in the possibility of assimilation is theoretically inclusionary and thus not “ethnic.” Accordingly, some authors distinguish civic from ethnic forms of cultural nationalism this way (e.g., Greenfeld 1992; Brubaker 1992). However, as Nieguth (1999: 163) notes, the civic/ethnic dichotomy is “commonly, though not necessarily correctly, equated” with Meinecke’s distinction between Staatsnation and Kulturnation. Consequently, culturally defined nationhood is often taken as inherently ethnic. Achieving consistent classification of assimilationist cultural nationalism as either “civic” or “ethnic” has thus proved problematic. As Nieguth (163) notes, the term “ethnic” implicitly conflates two dimensions that should be distinguished: ancestry and culture.
The contrast of civic and ethnic has also left scholars confused about membership in non-national polities. As we have seen, Kohn distinguished two understandings of the nation, and his successors have continued to divide ideas of political belonging into two types: civic and ethnic nationalism. But what of non-national political collectivities and the visions of belonging associated with them? Whether visions of political membership can be extended to kinds of states other than those in which they originate, and the extent to which non-national political experiences might be relevant for nation-states, is another point of confusion associated with the current literature (cf. Xenos 1996; Viroli 1995; Schaar 1981).
The confusions, puzzles, and problems to which the contrast between civic and ethnic gives rise are largely conceptual in origin. The Kohnian approach has been widely echoed by politicians, political leaders, journalists, and political commentators. But its apparent contradictions and conceptual confusions indicate a need for better analytical tools.
Some thinkers may object to developing a typology of views of “citizenship and nationality” together, on grounds that these are two different concepts. McCrone and Kiely (2000), for instance, argue strongly that “nationality and citizenship actually belong to different spheres of meaning and activity” (25). It is probably somewhat too simple, however, to define “nationality” exclusively as “a cultural concept which binds people on the basis of shared identity” while reserving “citizenship” for the “political concept deriving from people’s relationship to the state” as these authors suggest (25).
Such a distinction may be especially problematic if one is seeking a conceptual framework suitable for comparative research. It is important to recognize that the relationship between citizenship and nationality has itself varied, and that some nations have historically been more “political” and less “cultural”