Ethnic Nationalism

Ethnic nationalism has come to mean nationalism based on membership through genetic and cultural inheritance—based on blood and often, though not always, consisting of members of the same religious group—as opposed to nationalism that is inclusive and open for outsiders to join. Ethnic nationalism is often understood in opposition to civic nationalism, which is conceived of as mass, civic, and democratic. Within this paradigm, ethnic nationalism is interpreted as a reactionary force among ethnolinguistic groups (or, more accurately, reactionary elites who mobilize such groups on ethnic grounds) that seek to either maintain or increase their power vis-à-vis emerging civic nationalist democratic states. The word ethnic stems from the Ancient Greek ethnos meaning “people” or “group,” but it has often been used to denote “out”-groups rather than reflexively and was used by the Greeks to denote those groups outside their own community. Ethnic is often still used in the same way, referring to groups outside or not quite full members of a nation. It is crucial, however, to emphasize that ethnic and civic nationalisms only exist as ideal types. A nation may appear to have more ethnic than civic characteristics, but there will be components of civic nationalism apparent in ethnic nations, and the opposite holds true for civic nationalism. As an ideal type, civic nationalism is more commonly associated with a top-down eliteled construction of democratic states (often described as citizenship) in the face of pressures from industrialization and modernity, whereas ethnic nationalism is seen as coming from below—a reactionary movement on the part of reactionary conservatives looking to block the progress of modernity and largely volk-centered in its appeal. As ideal types, these paradigms are often exemplified by invoking progressive British and French nationalisms against the regressive and brutally [Page 367]violent nationalism in interwar Nazi Germany and Russia.

Prior to the last quarter of the 20th century, theories of nationalism were dominated by structural approaches to the emergence of identity within the state—that politics inspired by national identity were subservient to the needs of the state to create citizens, that nationalism was a temporary and reactionary response to class development or economic conditions, or that nationalism emerged where religious practice and belief were in decline. In Elie Kedourie's Nationalism in Asia and Africa of 1971, nationalism was portrayed as a return to the “Dark Gods,” and in most of the writings on nationalism during this period, nationalism was considered a form of politics that was anti-Enlightenment, especially where it emerged as a movement to assert the rights of minority groups that challenged universal citizenship, essential to the coherent functioning of the liberal democratic state. In such cases, nationalism serves no point in contemporary economic and political development but is rather an attempt through an elite, which is either academic or politician led, construction of false consciousness to address the alienation of industrialization. False consciousness here refers to the manner in which these elites construct a way of thinking about issues of nationalism that were not “organically” present in the population but rather instrumentally introduced into political debate to try to subvert or manipulate political perception and discussion. In this way, nationalist politics, which eschewed class demands and were even potentially antithetical to them, were being interpreted as regressive and out of tune with the needs of an industrialized and interdependent world. This led to analyses of a bad Eastern (ethnic) versus good Western (civic) nationalism, where the one was typified by exclusionary membership in the nation based on blood and birth (German and Russian nationalisms) and the other by membership that was construed as inclusive and open, based on a willingness on the part of potential conationals to accept those who willingly took up essential national practices (often portrayed as French Republican nationalism, with an emphasis on the importance of Francophonie—literally, the willingness to adopt the French language as the universal and discrete means of communication within the French nation).

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