Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European



Swiss liberals and conservatives united behind the notion of a distinct Swiss
cultural
Wesensgemeinschaft, which effectively „blurred the boundary between
voluntarist and organic conceptions of nationhood’. This suggests that the degree in
which political entrepreneurs disseminate these conceptions as contrasting visions
of nationhood depends very much on the wider political and social circumstances
and on the opportunities these circumstances offer them. To come back at the issue
of elite-mass differences, it must be noted that these differences extend to other
areas of public opinion as well. Campbell et. (1960), for instance, observed that the
left-right dimension in politics does not by far influence the American electorate to
the same extent as it does academics, intellectuals and political professionals. This
led them to conclude that „the closer the individual stands to the sophisticated
observer in education and political involvement, the more likely it is that the
observer’s analytical constructs will bear fruit’ (
ibid. p. 214). It is doubtful whether
scholars of nationalism realize that their models are likely to suffer from the same
deficiency.

The results of our analyses also revealed quite strong support for the East-West
component of the ethnic-civic framework. On average East European respondents
accorded more weight to the cultural and, especially, the ethnic dimension and less
weight to the political dimension than the respondents from Western Europe. This
finding appears to somewhat contradict those of Shulman and Jones & Smith. They
found either small or no differences at all between the regions, and on some
markers the differences were in the opposite direction from that expected - i.e. the
East assigning more importance to some „civic’ markers than the West (see
Shulman 2002, pp. 567, 569). Remember however that the ISSP data on which
these authors based their analyses did not contain questions on ethnic markers and

29



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