which makes it plausible to interpret this dimension as political. This result
corresponds to Hjerm’s findings on national pride and confirms the contention that
there is a distinct political dimension to conceptions of nationhood. Interestingly,
dimensions three (labelled cultural) and four (labelled ethnic) demonstrate that the
items of culture and language should clearly be seen as a separate category distinct
from the items ancestry and history. This supports the aforementioned criticism of
Kymlicka, Nielsen and Nieguth that the ethnic category as traditionally conceived
should be split into a cultural and an ethnic component.
Table 1 about here
It has to be noted though that the pattern of dimensions for the group of ten states
as a whole does not necessarily correspond to that of individual states. Not only
may the dimensions differ but also their order of importance. Whereas West
Germany for instance follows more or less the general pattern, Hungary presents a
strongly contrasting picture. Not only do the cultural and ethnic items cluster in one
dimension instead of two, also the order of the dimensions is reversed with the
ethno-cultural dimension capturing the highest percentage of variance. Yet, if we
group the countries into two regions - Western Europe and Eastern Europe - and
carry out the aforementioned factor analysis by region, then both halves of Europe
display the same pattern of dimensions as the one for all countries together. 6
Western Europe follows the general pattern precisely, both in the nature of the
dimensions and in their importance, Eastern Europe shows the same dimensions
but in a slightly different order of importance.7 Thus, the dimensions identified in
Table 1 have cross-regional validity.
16