Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

the ethnic-civic framework developed by Hans Kohn in World War II. Essentially
this theory argues that civic nationalism became the dominant ideology in a few
core states in Western Europe and America while ethnic notions of nationhood
prevailed in Eastern Europe and the peripheral areas of Western Europe. Although
few authors embraced this idea wholeheartedly, many of them started using the
ethnic-civic terminology and allowed it to influence their writings. From the mid
1990s however a growing body of literature seriously questioned the validity of the
ethnic-East/civic-West framework both conceptually and empirically.

Recently a number of studies have appeared that explored the extent to which
the ethnic-civic divide is reflected in popular notions of nationhood. That is, does
the population at large define its feeling of national belonging in ethnic-civic terms
or is the ethnic-civic distinction a purely academic construct, driving academic
debates but not having any impact on the national affiliations of the common man?
Analyzing survey data of the 1995 edition of the International Social Survey
Programme (ISSP), these studies, in brief, showed that people’s conceptions of
nationhood indeed clustered in an ascriptive (ethnic) and a voluntarist (civic)
dimension. However, they did not find pronounced differences between East and
West in the relative importance of ethnic and civic criteria.

This study will critically engage and complement these earlier studies by
examining the survey data of the Eurobarometer 2002 edition on national identity.
It will address a number of questions that these studies omitted or only partially
investigated. First, it will explore whether there are underlying dimensions in
people’s minds, and if so, to what extent these dimensions coincide with the ethnic-
civic dichotomy and relate to those found in the previous studies.

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