Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

Interestingly, Table 1 also shows that all items correlate positively with the five
dimensions. This pattern of positive correlations is even more clearly visible from a
table of correlations between pairs of items (see Appendix 1 which displays items
of both the Eurobarometer and ISSP surveys). The positive correlation between for
instance ancestry and rights (0.44) in the Eurobarometer data means that the higher
the level of agreement expressed with common ancestry as an identity marker so
the stronger the support for common rights and duties as a resource underpinning
one’s identity. The inference we can draw from this is that people apparently see
ancestry and rights, and all the other items in both the Eurobarometer and ISSP
surveys, more as non-competitive complementary concepts than as mutually
exclusive identity markers. This finding has important consequences for theories on
the nature of the ethnic-civic framework. It shows that when applied to popular
notions of nationhood this framework cannot be conceived of as a dichotomy. Nor
can it be viewed as a continuum with ideal-typical constructs because a continuum
also implies competing concepts (the more one moves to one end of the continuum
the further one moves away from the other end). If we are at all to visualize the
conceptual nature of popular understandings of nationhood, it would be more
appropriate to picture these understandings as a three-dimensional model
resembling a cone or a pyramid (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 about here

The fact that the models of a dichotomy or a continuum are unsuitable to describe
popular notions of nationhood does not mean that they cannot accurately represent
intellectual discourse. Indeed, contrary to the population at large, many academics,

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