Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

of civic nationalism had better be dropped from our political vocabulary (ibid. p.
127).

Equally critical is Kuzio (2001; 2002). He contends that both Western and
Eastern nations rest on strong ethnic foundations and that the former have only
become more civic in outlook since the 1960s. Drawing on writings of Kaufmann
(2000) and A.D. Smith (1998), he advances an evolutionary model that relates the
proportional mix of civic and ethnic practises in a given state to the age of that state
and to the consolidation of democratic institutions - i.e. the younger the state and
the less opportunity it had to develop a solid democracy, the more ethnic it still is
(Kuzio 2002).

Schoepflin (2000) is particularly outspoken on the ethnic-East/civic-West idea.
According to him, „the proposition that there is a Good Western nationalism (civic,
democratic, peace-loving etc) and a Bad Eastern nationalism (nasty, brutish and
anything but short)’ represents a „truly lazy’ attitude (ibid. pp. 4,5). Indeed, he may
be said to be taking Kuzio’s argument one step further by arguing that from the
nineteenth century onwards Western states needed ethnicity to create credible
national communities. These communities, he goes on to say, were necessary for
the ever-increasing levels of consent that the state had to win for its expanding role
in society. „Without ethnicity’, Schoepflin (2000, p. 6) boldly states, „it is difficult
to secure democracy’. Yet, he does contend that ethnic sentiments are currently
stronger in the East than in the West due to the former region’s particular
experience with communism:

Communism eliminated all possible civic institution and codes of conduct, it turned
these societies into civic deserts where the micro-level patterns of behaviour were
governed by mistrust and characterized by atomization. It was hardly unexpected,

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