A second question this article addresses is whether civic and ethnic conceptions
of nationhood are mutually exclusive or, on the other hand, reinforcing one another.
That is, do people (instinctively) make tradeoffs in a sense that a preference for -
say - a civic notion of nationhood is automatically at the expense of an ethnic one,
or are these notions of nationhood non-competitive? In much of the literature there
is an implicit understanding that ethnic and civic national identities exclude each
other. It is assumed that the two cannot go together because the former is seen as a
reflection of liberal inclusive attitudes and the latter as a manifestation of
conservatism and xenophobia. But is there tension between the two identities at the
level of popular understandings of nationhood?
Third, we will examine whether there is a regional difference in the degree of
endorsement of the various identity markers. Stated more directly: is the East
indeed more ethnic than the West and the West more civic than the East? As the
Eurobarometer survey included questions that covered all aspects of the ethnic-
civic distinction, we can explore its regional component to the fullest extent.
Fourth and last, this study will investigate the relationship between identity
markers and xenophobia. Is it true that people who predominantly support ethnic
criteria of nationhood display more negative attitudes towards immigrants than
people who endorse civic criteria, as many experts believe, or is the qualitative
nature of national identities irrelevant for opinions on ethnic others?
Analyses of the Eurobarometer data will reveal that the identity markers
addressed by the ethnic civic framework cluster in three distinct dimensions:
political, cultural and ethnic. The markers clustering in these dimensions are found
to be correlating positively with one another, which indicates complementary rather
than mutually excluding notions of nationhood. Consequently, we will argue that a