Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

that the differences between the countries and between the regions are not overly
impressive. Yet, the differences are statistically significant at the 0.01 level and do
go in the expected direction: East European countries consider cultural and ethnic
criteria more important markers of nationhood than the Western countries, the
difference between the regions being the largest on the ethnic dimension.⁹ Vice
versa the political dimension is deemed less relevant by the Eastern countries. The
results are thus clearly in line with the ethnic-East/civic-West argument.

Nonetheless, it must be noted that the variation between countries within a
region is substantial. Thus, Greece, as a West European state, has the lowest score
on the ethnic and cultural dimensions of all countries, which indicates that it
attaches more importance to these dimensions than the four Central European states.
Similarly, Poland’s average score on the political dimension is much lower than
that of the other East European states and it is the second lowest score of all
countries. Close scrutiny of the data in fact shows that the respondents of some
countries express high levels of agreement with all three dimensions (e.g. Greece
and Poland), whereas the respondents of other countries are much more reserved
across the board (e.g. West Germany, Italy). This may reflect different attitudes
towards social surveys and participating in them as a respondent. Respondents in
some countries might for instance have felt compelled to provide positive answers,
leading them to state high levels of agreement, while respondents in other countries
may not have felt a similar pressure.

In order to control for the propensity to state either high or low levels of support
for all three dimensions, we subtracted the scores on the political dimension from
those on the ethnic and from those on the cultural dimension (Table 3). The
resulting figures indicate the difference in support between the ethnic and the

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