RELIGION, ETHNICITY, AND CULTURE

Civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism as demonstrated may be analytically different but in practice they are intermeshing. Every individual nationalism is a hybrid construct, a synthesis of the civic and the ethnic. This means that each nationalism is civic and ethnic to some extent in that they carry different elements and characteristics of civic nationalism and different elements and characteristics of ethnic nationalism. Using France and Germany again as representations of the classical division, France representing civic nationalism and Germany ethnic nationalism, they are each perceived as archetypal examples of each respective category of nationalism. Though decidedly civic in principle or ethnic in flavour they are not purely such. The sophisticated dichotomists do not dispute this dilution, but they rarely follow through the consequences of the interplay. Brubaker himself acknowledges that each nation-state does not represent a purely political or purely apolitical understanding of nationhood. In Germany for example political authority was so limited that it could not enter into the understanding of nationhood, this responsibility was thus carried by ethnicity. But this was only at the period of nation formation. As Germany developed to form one united national unit its political authority also developed. Initially in Germany identification with the instruments and institutions of the state were absent, as modernity progressed they developed and were integrated in the overall understanding of nationhood, even if led by the ethnocultural conception. Nationhood in Germany was then perhaps predominantly an ethnocultural concept at its inception, but the understanding, and more importantly the exercise of nationalism in Germany was never purely ethnocultural or just a dilution of it, but an interplay of the dominant ethnocultural feature of nationalism with its civic components. Likewise in France, the inception of nationhood was never purely political, though its foundations were based on political understanding. For France as a nation-state to progress and for its members to practice its nationalism – for the members to possess the will to partake in it – the emotive features possessed by ethnicity as a form of culture were necessary. France and Germany perhaps exercise different variations of nationalism, but the fact remains that they both do exercise and partake in nationalism. They both partake in this ideological movement in order to progress in modernity, thus rather than examining what differentiates the two nation-states, there is something that both France and Germany possess that makes their nationalism successful. This similarity is the successful interplay of the pressures on nationalism, which include the civic components and the ethnic components.