argument that Poland had a long tradition of inclusive civic nationhood (i.e. a
boundary mechanism).
In fact, our study of the Eurobarometer data revealed that there are also
resources other than political, cultural and ethnic that shaped national allegiances.
Four of these clustered in a dimension that we labelled patriotism (which proved to
be the strongest predictor of national identity) and two remaining items - army and
common borders - in a construct that could be interpreted as state territory. Thus,
the markers of national identity are many and varied, and can differ from country to
country in kind, importance and interrelatedness.
What they all have in common, however, is their non-competitive nature: not a
single pair of markers shows a negative correlation in either the ISSP or the
Eurobarometer database. This is a cardinal finding. As noted before, many authors
assume ethnic and political visions of the nation or voluntarist and ascriptive
boundary mechanisms to be mutually excluding concepts - remember that Zimmer
(2003) argued that the latter could be conceived of as a dichotomy. Yet, valid as
this interpretation might be for debates among academics, intellectuals and
politicians, it evidently does not apply to popular notions of nationhood. Thus,
there may be a distinct difference between the elite and the masses in the way they
interpret their national attachments. The author of the aforementioned study on the
Polish constitutional debate also seems to arrive at this conclusion when she notes
that voter turn-out at the referendum on the Constitution was very low, „which
seems to indicate that the debates that fascinated the elites did not resonate as
strongly below’ (Zubrzycki 2001, p. 653). Non-competitive notions of nationhood
are in fact not strictly confined to the common man. Zimmer (2003, p. 188) himself
observes that, in response to the perceived threat from Germany in the late 1930s,
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