Beyond the Opposition: Civic Nation versus Ethnic Nation

Abstract

The political and scientific debate surrounding the concepts of nation, ethnicity, and nationalism is so deeply loaded with values and passions that it should be the sociologist's highest priority to define those terms as precisely as possible in order to distinguish a new debate from the common discourse and to subject the definitions to scrutiny. It is often acknowledged that a clarification of the terms used in the debates of ethnicity, the State, the nation and nationalism is necessary, but such work is rarely done. It is important to make a distinction between the term ‘nation’ and other terms with which it is often confused — and differently in the different nations — and to clear up the ambiguities that affect the political, ideological, and scientific discourse. In the common discourse and even in the scientific literature, such terms as ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ are often used indifferently, and the ‘nation’ is subject to contradictory criticisms as it is sometimes understood as referring to the ‘nation’ and sometimes to the ‘ethnic group.’ There is always a connection between the concepts used by a given author and that author's theoretical frame of reference.

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