Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

political dimension on the one hand, and between the cultural and the political
dimension on the other. The lower the score, the stronger the backing for the ethnic
or the cultural dimension relative to the political dimension. As we can see, the
familiar ethnic-East/civic-West pattern emerges even more clearly from the data of
Table 3. Hungary and the Czech republic top the list of both the ethnic-political and
cultural-political columns.¹⁰ Moreover, all East European countries are in the top
five of the ranking list of countries in the ethnic-political column with Greece being
the only exception. On the cultural-political dimension the pattern is slightly less
clear because Poland has a score that is so different from the other Eastern states.
Aggregated to the regional level, the data show that there are substantial and
statistically significant differences between East and West, with the former
attaching much more importance to the ethnic and cultural dimensions in relation to
the political dimension than the latter.

Table 3 about here

Yet some important reservations have to be stated. First, Eastern Europe is
represented by just four countries. In the ISSP data set the variations between the
nine East European countries were at least as large as those between the Western
states. Thus we might have witnessed larger differences within Eastern Europe if
the Eurobarometer survey had included more East European countries. Second, it is
surprising to find West Germany and Austria occupying such low positions on the
ranking list of countries on the ethnic-political column. Austria even has a positive
score indicating that its respondents show slightly stronger support for political
markers than for ethnic markers. This result is not in line with the ethnic-East/civic-

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