Civic versus Ethnic Nationalism

The distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism, while foreshadowed in Herder and Fichte, received its classic modern statement in Hans Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism (1944), which contrasted a "Western" model, associated with Britain, France, and the United States, in which national membership is defined by shared citizenship, voluntary political allegiance, and adherence to common civic institutions, with an "Eastern" model, associated with Germany and much of Central and Eastern Europe, in which national membership is defined by shared ethnic descent, language, and culture, often construed as fixed at birth and largely closed to outsiders. Kohn's geographic labels have since been widely criticized as an oversimplification — actual nationalisms rarely instantiate either pole in pure form — but the underlying conceptual distinction between demos-based and ethnos-based conceptions of the nation has proven durable and remains central to normative political philosophy's engagement with nationalism.