The larger layer of identity that is the nation depends on the more foundational layers in order to function without resorting to coercion. We could look at this another way, in terms of legitimacy. No doubt a polity can hold together by top-down force, but this is inefficient and therefore maladaptive. So much energy (whether spiritual, economic, or indeed ultimately even caloric energy) is spent managing ephemeral problems that the society loses the adaptive advantage of acting as a nation. Legitimacy is an inverse friction coefficient: the more legitimacy a form of life has, the more people will accept it voluntarily.

The legitimacy of a form of life is largely a function of feeling like it is ours. When something is “right full stop”, universally and in the abstract, it lacks natural force, and must be continually reinforced by inculturation. When something is ours, not only is it right, but the moral calculus reverses: ours is not seen in terms of right, right is judged in terms of for us. This—what we will call ours-ness—gives us a powerful tool to explain what seem like totally incommensurable ideas of the nation: ethnic vs. civic nationalism.

Ethnic nationalism is the least abstract form of nationalism, defining the nation primarily through the pre-political identities beneath it: family, clan, tribe, and folk. Ethnic nationalism says: the nation is an extended people. This means it does not have to invent belonging primarily through the state. The state may protect or organize the people, but the people exists prior to the state. Civic nationalism is the most abstract form, defining the nation mainly through thinner identities beyond the level of the pre-political, in terms of citizenship, law, and creed. Civic nationalism in its modern liberal form says: the nation is a community of shared values. If the nation is defined by values, why should it remain a distinct nation at all? If the values are universal, then anyone who accepts them can belong. And if anyone can belong, then the nation ceases to be a people and devolves to a proposition.

We can look at ethnic vs. civic nationalism also in terms of ours-ness. In ethnic nationalism, ours-ness comes from being of the same people: this is ours because it belongs to our inherited people. In civic nationalism, ours-ness comes from state membership or public creed: this is ours because we are citizens under the same institutions and profess the same political principles. The irony is that civic nationalism may work when it draws upon an already-existing ethnic nation, but when it tries to stand alone, it cannot hold a population together without coercion. Civic nationalism only survives by borrowing emotional force from ethnic nationalism while denying that it needs it.

Ethnic nationalism is least likely to undermine the roots of nationalism, because it stays closest to those roots. Civic nationalism is the form most likely to undermine nationalism because it detaches the nation from the pre-political identities that make nations thick. Put another way, the more civic the nationalism, the more the state must create the nation out of thin air. The healthy order is that a people makes up a nation, and the nation produces a state instrument. The civic nationalist formulation is that a state produces the category of citizenship, through which the state manufactures a nation. This is why civic nationalism is more costly, more fragile, and more coercive than ethnic nationalism.

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My Reaction

The United States of America has evolved from an ethnic nation to a civic nation, if nation it can be described, at all. It is more a state; a collection of diverse races, cultures, religions kept together under one polity by the coercion of the state and ruled by oligarchs.