that the difference between East and West was most pronounced on the ethnic
dimension in the Eurobarometer data. In addition, it must be noted that Shulman’s
civic and cultural categories did not coincide with Jones and Smith’s voluntarist
and ascriptive dimensions. Thus, some items that Shulman considered civic were
interpreted as ascriptive by Jones and Smith. Finally, taking a close look at
language and political institutions, identity markers that were included in both data
sets, it can be noted that the ISSP and the Eurobarometer showed a similar pattern:
Eastern Europe places greater value on language but less value on political
institutions than does Western Europe (see Appendix 2 and Shulman 2002, pp. 568,
571). Thus the data of the two surveys are consistent.
Obviously, having established the existence of an ethnic-East/political-West
pattern in a given year says nothing about its stability. The question to explore is
thus to what extent this pattern of identities is inert, as primordialists would predict,
or subject to change, as instrumentalists would argue. As the 2001 Eurobarometer
was a cross-sectional survey carried out at a single point in time, it does not give us
direct indicators of changes in understandings of nationhood. However, indirectly
the data suggest that these understandings are dynamic rather than inert. We noted
before that compared to the other countries in the survey respondents in Austria
and West Germany expressed strong support for the political dimension relative to
the ethnic dimension. This is surprising as West Germany and Austria have
traditionally been seen as countries where ethnic conceptions of nationhood prevail.
We postulated that ethnic conceptions might indeed have been dominant Austria
and West Germany but that the success of their post-war democracies and socio-
economic systems may have caused a change in the relative importance of identity
markers. The post-war political and economic achievements are likely to have
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