Civic and Ethnic
Ethnic nationalism is
Nationalism
AVIEL ROSHWALD
Georgetown University, USA
The contrast between civic and ethnic nation-
alism is based on one of the oldest and most
frequently employed typological distinctions
in nationalism studies. The phrase “civic
nationalism” denotes the claims of legitimacy
for, and the sense of commitment to, the
exercise of territorial sovereignty by (or in
the name of) a people with a shared political
identity. The common rights, duties, and val-
ues of citizenship, irrespective of any ethnic
or cultural differences among the citizenry,
are considered to constitute the foundation
of peoplehood in this framework; in theory,
statehood is the forge of nationhood.
Ethnic nationalism derives its force from
a sense of kinship and a myth of shared
ancestry that is thought to predate state-
hood. Shared cultural traits and traditions are
seen as manifestations of such quasi-familial
connections; the cultivation of shared cul-
ture, in turn, reinforces the bonds of ethnic
nationalism. The most common cultural ele-
ments in this category are linguistic, religious,
and/or racial—forms of identity that are actu-
ally socially constructed but are reflexively
regarded as reliable indicators of a person’s
parentage.
In their classic articulations as well as in
the way they continue to be employed by
many public commentators, the contrast-
ing typologies have been linked to starkly
drawn normative and geocultural differences.
Civic nationalism is commonly associated
with liberal–democratic, culturally inclusive
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, First Edition.
Edited by John Stone, Rutledge M. Dennis, Polly S. Rizova, Anthony D. Smith, and Xiaoshuo Hou.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663202.wberen436
political regimes.
widely seen as going hand in hand with polit-
ical authoritarianism, intolerance toward
minorities, and a proclivity to domestic
and/or interstate violence.
Western European countries such as
France and Britain, along with the United
States, Canada, and the other predominantly
anglophone societies formed through immi-
gration from all over the world, have been
held up as paradigmatic examples of civic
nations. In the British and French cases, a
sense of popular nationhood is said to have
evolved over time within the framework of
preexisting monarchies that succeeded in
forging bonds of cultural cohesion among
the elite segments of their subject popu-
lations. The gradual and/or revolutionary
rise of parliamentary and democratic insti-
tutions then led to the crystallization of
civic forms of nationhood in such contexts.
As heir to the British parliamentary tradi-
tion and as a country whose culturally and
racially diverse citizenry is held together
by the very constitutional framework that
gave political shape to the nation in the first
place, the United States is often considered
the purest example of culture-blind, civic
nationhood.
Ethnic nationalism has been closely iden-
tified with regions of the world where the
bonds of popular cultural identity, as they
formed in the modern era of democratizing
politics, tended to call into question existing
political boundaries and state formations
rather than reinforce them. Ethnic nation-
alism could take the form of unificatory
movements cutting across state borders,
as in the case of nineteenth-century Ger-
man nationalism. It could also manifest
itself as autonomist, separatist, or irredentist
2 CIVIC AND ETHNIC NATIONALISM
movements that challenged the cohesion of
territorially contiguous, multicultural polities
such as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires,
the Romanov empire and its Soviet successor
state, or indeed the very multiethnic states
(such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia)
that arose in the wake of the Eurasian multi-
national empires’ collapse during and after
World War I. In the context of the postcolo-
nial states of Africa and Asia, most of which
gained their independence following World
War II, political boundaries tend to be lega-
cies of European imperial decisions rather
than of indigenous historical traditions. The
civic bonds that hold these states together
are often correspondingly weak in the face of
ethnic nationalist challenges.
Under one terminological guise or another,
this typological template can be traced back
to the nineteenth-century work of Lord
Acton (see Dalberg-Acton 2007) and Ernest
Renan (see Renan 1996) and the early- to
mid-twentieth-century writings of Carlton
Hayes (Hayes 1931) and Hans Kohn (Kohn
1948). The horrors of World War II served
to paint a dramatic contrast between the
racialized, genocidal ethnic nationalism
of Nazi Germany and the liberating civic
nationalism of the United States. In more
recent decades, however, scholars (Brubaker
2004; Kuzio 2002; Kymlicka 1995; Tamir
1993) have called into question many aspects
of the civic–ethnic contradistinction. The
dichotomy has been shown to be problematic
both typologically and normatively.
By virtue of being ideal types, the cate-
gories of civic and ethnic nationalism fail
to capture the complex, shifting, and highly
contested forms that national identities take
as they evolve over time. In practice, the com-
munal sentiment holding together ostensibly
civic nations invariably rests upon signif-
icant (if often unacknowledged) cultural
components, in whose absence it would be
difficult to imagine the long-term duration
of any substantive sense of national soli-
darity at all. A shared language is a typical
cultural common denominator among the
members of a civic nation, as in the case of
the predominance of English in the United
States. Moreover, the historical origins of
civic nations can usually be shown to have
been closely associated with a particular
ethnocultural community, as in the case of
Anglo-Saxons in the United States. Mem-
bership in such nations for people of other
ethnocultural backgrounds has accord-
ingly tended to depend in large measure
on their ability to assimilate culturally, as
well as on the willingness of the historically
hegemonic ethnocultural group to facilitate
and acknowledge their assimilation. Racial
minorities have faced particularly difficult
challenges in this regard.
On the other hand, there are a num-
ber of civic-type nation-states that have
sought to accommodate the political agendas
associated with territorially concentrated
ethno-linguistic communities through
various forms of institutionalized multi-
culturalism. Canada, with its predominantly
francophone Quebec as part of a predom-
inantly anglophone confederation that is
formally bilingual at the federal level, is
one case in point. Belgium, with its distinct
Flemish- and French-speaking regions and
its officially bilingual national capital, is
another. The statewide, civic nationalisms
of such countries ostensibly transcend their
internal ethnolinguistic divisions; yet, by
virtue of not being firmly rooted in any
one ethnocultural tradition, they may also
appear extremely tenuous and fragile. The
imminent possibility of fragmentation seems
permanently to overshadow many such poli-
ties. The notable exception of Switzerland
is partly explicable precisely as a result of
the unusually extensive political–territorial
autonomy enjoyed by the Swiss federation’s
individual cantons, each of which is much

more ethnolinguistically homogeneous than
the multicultural federation as a whole.
If all civic nationalisms are based on, or
are obliged to accommodate, some form
of ethnocultural identity, for their part, all
ethnic nationalisms (by virtue of most def-
initions of the term “nationalism”) aspire to
statehood—or to a qualified form thereof,
such as political autonomy. In the mod-
ern era statehood is associated—if only
nominally—with principles and values such
as citizenship, territoriality, and the equitable
rule of law among all permanent inhabitants
of the state’s territory. Thus an ethnic nation-
alist movement’s very success at gaining
political independence for its people may
lead to the development of civic institutions
that undercut or clash with the ethnonational
principle. Even in instances where ethnic
cleansing has resulted in a high degree of
congruity between a state’s dominant ethnic-
ity and its citizenry, the modern pressures of
global migration are likely to raise new dilem-
mas over how to reconcile the idea of ethnic
kinship with the formal rights and duties of
membership in a territorially circumscribed
political community.
On the normative plane, the stereotypi-
cal identification of civic nationalism with
liberal–democratic virtue and of ethnic
nationalism with intolerant vice has also
been cast into doubt. Liberal–democratic
critics of civic nationalism have pointed out
that a state that presents its own cultural
idiom as somehow neutral and that—in the
name of equality for all individuals—limits
the cultivation of minority cultures through
public institutions such as the educational
system not only may be accused of politi-
cal hypocrisy, but in fact may be violating
the cultural rights of minority individuals.
Conversely, in some cases the establishment
of a new state on an avowedly ethnic basis
may prove to be the least possible evil amid
the violent conditions of interethnic conflict.
CIVIC AND ETHNIC NATIONALISM 3
That said, nearly every ethnocultural seces-
sion has the potential to set in motion a new
set of ethnocultural clashes within the newly
carved-out nation-state, as illustrated by the
fighting that broke out in December 2013
between Nuer and Dinka communities in the
recently formed country of South Sudan.
Recent scholarship has thus moved away
from essentialist and overly simplistic con-
tradistinctions between civic and ethnic
nationalisms, historically laden as these
are with Euro-Atlantic claims to historical
exceptionalism. Yet the very preoccupation
with problematizing these terms reflects their
continued heuristic utility, provided they are
understood to represent ideal types rather
than concrete realities. Instead of using these
concepts to draw reductionist dichotomies,
one can more productively think of them
as endpoints on a continuous typological
spectrum ranging from purely civic nation-
alism to exclusively ethnic nationalism. Most
existing nationalisms can be thought of as
falling somewhere along this continuum.
Moreover, the most interesting questions
concern, not where exactly on this spectrum
any given case belongs, but rather how civic
and ethnic conceptions of nationhood inter-
act with one another—both conflictually and
synergistically—within any given political
community, how these forms of identity
evolve over time, and how they are shaped
by, and contribute to the shaping of, inter-
national and transnational history and
politics.
SEE ALSO: Connor, Walker (1926–); France;
Germany; Nationalism; Patriotism
REFERENCES
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Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward. 2007
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4 CIVIC AND ETHNIC NATIONALISM
Hayes, Carlton. 1931. The Historical Evolution of
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Kohn, Hans. 1948. The Idea of Nationalism: A
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Renan, Ernest. 1996 [1882]. “What Is a Nation?”
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Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
FURTHER READING
Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to
Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of
Anglo-America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Nielsen, Kai. 1999. “Cultural Nationalism, neither
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SUNY Press.
Roshwald, Aviel. 2006. The Endurance of National-
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bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shulman, Stephen. 2002. “Challenging the
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