3.1: The Nation’s Civic-Territorial and Ethno-Cultural Contents
There is something of a tradition in nationalism studies to distinguish between ethno-cultural and civic-territorial nations. Beginning with Hans Kohn, scholars theorized that the nation could be categorized as one of these two types. Kohn in particular viewed the “civic nation” as a product of 17th Century English liberalism. As the original and ideal type, according to Kohn, the civic nation supposedly grew out of the enlightenment rationality, individual liberty and middle class autonomy found first in England. Kohn saw the civic nation become dominant in Europe west of the Rhine in the 18th century.139 In contrast, Kohn viewed nations east of the Rhine as an ethno-centric corruption of the original civic model.140 The alleged duality between these two types of the nation has since generated a theoretical debate in which a number of scholars have eagerly criticized Kohn’s dichotomy as improperly normative and essentialist, and thus a questionable starting point for further research.141 Dungaciu describes the essential difference articulated by Kohn, as well as its problematic rise to prominence:
Essentially, the Western type is a "voluntarist" type of nationalism which regards the nation as a free association of rational human beings entered into voluntarily on an individual basis, while the Eastern is an "organic" type which views the nation as an organism, as a fixed and indelible character which was "stamped" on its members at birth and from which they can never free themselves. Kohn’s approach and perspective are an attempt to separate the good from the bad, the normal type from the deviant type, by using geographical criteria…This distinction in all its variants – Western nationalism versus Eastern nationalism, civic nationalism versus ethnic nationalism, voluntaristic nationalism versus organic nationalism – was well-entrenched in post-World War II literature, and made quite a climb again in the 1990s. The distinction was not, even in the beginning, only an analytical distinction; it was also a normative one. And this last aspect was emphasized and has become prevalent today. From a hypothesis, it gradually turned into a premise, into an axiom; it became a starting point for the research, not – possibly – a conclusion.
139 Dan Dungaciu, “East and West and the ‘Mirror of Nature’: Nationalism in West and East Europe – Essentially Different?” Paper presented at A Decade of Transformation, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vienna, 1991, 5.
140 Ibid.
141 Dungaciu quotes Nietzsche, who criticizes humanity’s “bad habit” of seeing “everywhere in nature opposites (as, for example, ‘warm and cold’) where there are not opposites, but differences in degree.” For Dungaciu, the Eastern versus Western, or ethnic versus civic nationalism trope is an essentialist framework that has become a
“standard… axiomatic starting point” despite being highly dubious. See Ibid., 1-2, 11.
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Despite this and many similar criticisms, Kohn’s thesis remains fascinating as a fundamental theoretical distinction, if not a useful interpretation of history. Echoes of Kohn’s thesis are visible in later works as well. Hobsbawm’s work, as Smith rightly notes, aligns with Kohn in its distinction between two broad types of nationalism: the “mass, civic and democratic political nationalism, modelled on the kind of citizen nation created by the French Revolution”
and prominent from 1830-1870, and an “ethno-linguistic nationalism” which “prevailed in Eastern Europe from 1870-1914, and resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s… in Asia and Africa.”142
We need neither to agree with nor to discount Hobsbawm’s reading of history, however, to see the appeal in Smith’s more practical and useful stance: “Every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and different forms.”143 In other words, “the nation has come to blend two sets of dimensions, the one civic and territorial, the other ethnic and
genealogical, in varying proportions in particular cases.”144 If every nationalism and every putative nation can be described as having a particular proportion of civic-territorial and ethnic or ethno-linguistic elements, then it makes sense to first elucidate what these two forms of the nation look like in theory and in practice.
3.1.1: The Civic-Territorial Nation
One prominent theorist of civic nationalism, Michael Ignatieff, writes that civic nationalism “envisages' the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.”145 As is commonly the case, Ignatieff defines civic nationalism in direct opposition to ethnic nationalism, stressing that the former is a kind of “rational attachment,” in which a society binds itself together through a shared, self-conscious commitment to certain values and a certain way of doing politics.
Ignatieff sees civic nationalism as a viable option only in democracies, but only because he defines it in the language of the Western post-enlightenment norms of democracy and human rights. (Is it not possible for citizens of a non-democracy to patriotically identify with one
142 Anthony Smith, Nationalism and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 121. See also Dungaciu, “East and West,” 7.
143 Anthony Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 13.
144 Ibid., 15.
145 Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books, 1993), 6.
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another and with their state on the basis of shared political practices and values? More
importantly, if elites and political entrepreneurs in a non-democracy seek to promote that kind of identification, can we call their form of politics anything other than civic nationalism?)
In his study on civic and ethnic national identity in Ukraine, Shulman offers a somewhat similar definition, though it is less exclusive to non-democracies:
With civic nationalism, people in a nation-state think that what can, does or should unite and distinguish all or most members of the nation are such features as living on a common territory, belief in common political principles, possessions of state citizenship,
representation by a common set of political institutions and desire or consent to be part of the nation.146
As suggested in his mentioning of “common territory” within the definition of civic nationalism, Shulman uses the civic nation as shorthand for a nation “conceived in political and territorial terms,” and idea that we can more fully term the civic-territorial nation. 147 His survey tests the salience of this form of national identity by asking whether respondents believe that “Common political principle and ideas” and the “Coexistence and equal rights in the framework of one state (Ukraine)” unites or could unite the people of Ukraine “into a single community.”148 Shulman’s data reveals that civic-territorial factors outweigh ethno-cultural factors in Ukrainians’
perception of their own national community.149 Indeed far from an empty, theoretical concept, civic-territorial identity can be the more salient part of the overall imagining of particular
“nations.”
As referenced at the outset, Pye argued that mid-1990’s China featured a notorious lack of “collective ideals and shared inspirations” capable of generated nationalism. Nonetheless, recent polling demonstrates that “self-identity of many Chinese is intimately tied to their country,”
and that “the vast majority of Chinese take pride in their country’s place in the world.”150 Indeed we may have witnessed, in the past 70 years, a transition from a Maoist, ideology-based
nationalism to a prestige-based political nationalism in the PRC. (This and related issues are explored in the following chapter). According to polling conducted by international experts in
146 Stephen Shulman, “The Contours of Civic and Ethnic National Identification in Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies 56, no. 1 (January 2004): 35.
147 Ibid.
148 Ibid., 42.
149 Ibid, 44.
150 Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma, 235.
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2014, 84.9 percent of PRC citizens strongly agreed or agreed, “Even if I could pick any country in the world, I still want to be a Chinese citizen.”151 This implies exactly the “rational
attachment” described by Ignatieff and the “desire or consent” noted by Shulman. Why should the Chinese feel a desire to be PRC citizens? 80.4 percent of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that, “Generally speaking, China is better than most other countries.”152 Both percentages noted above increased over the already high figures observed in 2010.153 So a civic attachment to the nation, far from an impossibility, is probably quite present in contemporary China. The following two chapters investigate the civic-territorial elements in Chinese nationalist discourse that, presumably, reinforce the sentiments implied in the survey findings noted above.
3.1.2: The Ethno-Cultural Nation
Ethno-cultural nationalism, on the other hand, can be understood to arise from Geertz’s
“givenness:” the “congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on” with their “ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness.”154 Even though ethnic nationalism claims that “an
individual's deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen,”155 the determination of which
attachments are politically salient occurs through politics. Ethnicity, after all, is “a classification that can potentially draw on social, cultural, political, or economic characteristics of the
individual or group, but that is rooted in the belief in shared kinship and descent among the members of the ethnic group.”156 The question of which ethnic markers become salient parts of identity is fully contextual and constructed, as a change in social, economic, or political reality necessarily shifts the markers that are endowed with ethnic significance.
Shulman defines ethno-cultural nationalism as the concept that “what can, does or should unite and distinguish [a nation] are such features as common ancestry, culture, language, religion, traditions, and race.”157 In proposing that a cultural community ought to become a nation, ethno-cultural nationalists combine a kernel of “sociological fact” with a mythologized, ethno-centric
151 Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma, 236.
152 Ibid.
153 Ibid.
154 Geertz, New Societies, Old States, 109. Quoted in 高格孚, 《 風和日暖》, 61.
155 Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 7.
156 Emphasis added. Abramson, Marc S., Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 9.
157 Shulman, “Contours of Civic and Ethnic,” 35.
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worldview and interpretation of history. The “sociological fact” includes the observable realities of intercommunicability of the group and a degree of Durkheimian “logical conformism,” i.e, “a homogenous conception” of time and space “which makes it possible for different people [within the ethno-cultural community] to reach agreement or consensus on the immediate meaning of the world.”158 Both of these facets of the “sociological fact” of cultural commonality stem primarily from the symbolism of language, a fact that helps explain why scholars of nationalism have devoted particular attention to this most fundamental aspect of social behavior. In fact, some ethno-cultural nationalists deterministically equate differences in language with differences in essential nature. As German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote, “Every language is a particular mode of thought, and what is cogitated in one language can never be repeated in the same way in another.”159 How, after all, can humans of different languages share a social and political experience if meaning itself is linguistically-bound?160
Yet ethno-cultural nationalism translates the “fact” of cultural commonality within a given “in-group” into a political imperative: the nationalization of either the state or the people (this distinction is explored in section 3.2). In doing so it inevitably exceeds the objectively
“true,” and moves into mythologies of history and concepts of destiny that devalue out-groups and contribute to identity of the in-group. Smith’s eight-part myth of ethnie, discussed in section 2.4, provide the community with its subjective sense of self and, and by giving it a relatively stable, inheritable source of identity, the ethnie myth further reinforcing the objective
“logical conformism” of the community. In other words, communities with
intercommunicability and some degree of latent “logical conformism” by virtue of shared symbolism – an objective “sociological reality” – must also receive (and accept) a subjective identity that allows “in-groupness” to translate into particular political imperatives. Below, figure 3.1.2 presents the author’s conception of the objective and subjective dimensions of ethno-cultural communities.
158 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 166. Quoted in Pang Qin,
“The Rise of Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Main Content and Causes,” Elixer International Journal 36 (2011): 3361, http://www.elixirpublishers.com/articles/1350542599_36%20(2011)%203361-3365.pdf.
159 Quoted in Eugene Kamenka, “Political Nationalism – The Evolution of the Idea,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 11.
160 It is worth noting, of course, that multi-lingual nations exist. Switzerland is a frequently mentioned example.
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Figure 3.1.2: Logical Conformism of Ethno-Cultural Communities
Because the ethno-cultural nation requires both the existence of objective sociological commonality and a broad consensus on mythology and identity, we can expect ethno-cultural nationalist rhetoric to function on both levels. Gellner’s correct emphasis on the revolutionary effects of industrial modernity and universal education on communication and Anderson’s correct emphasis on print-media in a common vernacular both highlight the necessity of objective sociological commonalities as a precondition to the self-conscious community that is the nation. Yet as we have seen in Smith, nations have – or take on – ‘ethnic roots’ above and beyond the objective criteria emphasized by Gellner and Anderson. The engendering of a subjective mythology typically requires not only the existence of intercommunicability
(including widespread literacy) in a common vernacular, but also the activation of that common symbolic system to create a dominant interpretation of events in which the nation is imagined as the subject of history, as a coherent actor in the present, and as an object of destiny. In that sense, a fully developed ethno-cultural nation has not only latent logical conformism, but also
actualized logical conformism. We can thus expect the rhetoric of ethno-cultural nationalism to employ the former to promote and pursue the latter.
The state is ideally suited to create, enforce, and maintain the logical conformism that undergirds the ethno-cultural community. As Yack contends, all states are culturally situated,
Objective Sociological Commonalities
What is truth?
Intercommunicability Latent logical conformism
Subjective Mythology Who are we?
What is our role in the world?
Smith’s ethnie myths Actualized logical conformism
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and “bound, to a certain extent, to take on the form of inherited cultural artifacts.161 Unlike religion, which the state may fully adopt (theocracy), fully reject (institutionalized atheism) or ignore (separation of church and state), culture is inherent in all that the state does. All states are cultural, in other words, as they “must use cultural tools and symbols to organize, exercise, and communicate political authority.”162 There is no “separation of state and culture;” perhaps the closest example, progressive multi-culturalism, is still cultural as such. This illuminates a key aspect of the nationalizing tendencies of the state, that is, the state’s tendency to engage in the polity-based (nationalizing) nationalism discussed below in section 3.2. Thus conceptualizing the CCP as an actor which employs the mechanisms of the state to pursue this kind of
nationalism not only fits with the logic of ‘Gramscian’ expansive hegemony presented in the introduction, but also reflects the reality of what makes an ethno-cultural community.
3.1.3: Issues in the Civic-Territorial, Ethno-Cultural Duality
The distinctions laid out above are important as a foundational typology, but when applied as a rigid, dichotomous lens through which the content of a putative nation is viewed, it may obscure more than clarify. Particularly in the Chinese case, this author finds potential issues.
First, combining the ethnic and the cultural into a single national type confuses two rather different articulations of China found in both modern and classical Chinese history. Chang’s study on orthodoxy in Chinese dynastic history finds that since the Han Dynasty, three distinct meanings of “China,” i.e., three distinct kinds of Chinese-ness are present in Chinese political writings. Specifically, they are a geographical China, a cultural China, and an ethnic China.163 Both China as a concept and Chinese identity were thus variously grounded in culturalism,
“geographism,” and “ethnicism,” as disparate states attempted to legitimize their relationship to the orthodox (正統)dynastic succession reaching back to the Qin dynasty.164
Indeed, despite the attractiveness of Kohn’s dichotomy at the theoretical level, historical discourse on Chinese-ness appears to pair cultural identity with civic identity as much as or more
161 Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, 28.
162 Ibid.
163 「從漢代以降, 中國思想界已經形成地理意義的, 文化意義的和族裔意義的三種『中國』概念, 亦即三種
『中國性』」. 張其賢 ,〈正統論，中國性與中國認同〉,《政治科學論叢》第 64 期 (2015 年 6 月): 3.
164 Ibid., 6.
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than with ethnic identity.165 In particular, Ming scholar Fang Xiaoru (方孝孺) wrote, “that which makes China noble is the hierarchy of king and subjects, the teaching of rites and righteousness, distinguishing [China] from the barbarians. Without [the ethics of] king and subjects, one is barbarian, and if barbarian, hardly more than beast.”166 This conception of Chinese-ness embodies both civic or civilizational and cultural attributes while rejecting an ethnic distinction between Chinese and barbarian. Barbarians (夷狄), according to Fang, are not people who descend from different ancestors, but rather those who do not adhere to China’s Confucian value system. Although this example greatly precedes the arrival of nationalism in China, it nonetheless demonstrates that rigidly combining ethnicity and culture as one type of identity in opposition to civic and territorial attributes may be at odds with China’s historical discourse on identity. Indeed, in the case of pre-modern China, one wonders whether a
trichotomy of “civilizational-cultural,” “ethno-centric,” and “territorial” would more accurately depict the various dimensions of discourse on Chinese-ness.
The tendency to group “culture” with “ethnicity” in current English may reflect the values of social scientists more than the actual perceptions and experience of human societies. In particular, there appears to be a deeply-ingrained taboo within English-language social science against assertions that different groups of people have different essential characteristics.
“Ethnicity,” therefore, simply cannot be taken to mean anything more than a modular social construction, lest we return to the social-Darwinism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This line of thinking, though perfectly understandable, nonetheless leads English-language social science to overlook the slightly more essentialist conception of ethnicity suggested by evolutionary biology. From a purely biological perspective, “micro-evolution” has had
undeniable effects on different ethnic groups, especially through the process of co-evolution, in which “genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other.”167 This
165 The author recognizes that extending “civic identity” back before the modern concept of citizenship is
problematic by definition. Nonetheless, China’s civilizational identity, centered in particular on a Confucian value system, seems not entirely different from “civic identity” as it is broadly employed in this study. The author thanks professor Chang Chishen (張其賢) for pointing out that the identity in question here is really civilizational identity, rather than “civic” in the modern sense. Crucially, however, whether “civic” or “civilizational,” this identity is indeed non-ethnic, and yet very closely tied to culture.
166「夫中國之為貴者，以有君臣之等，禮義之教，異乎夷狄也．無君臣則入於夷狄，入夷狄則與禽獸幾矣」
方孝孺,〈後正統論〉，載氏著，徐光大校點：《遜志齋集》（寧波：寧波出版社，2000 年），卷 2，57.
167 Jonathan Haidt, “Faster Evolution Means More Ethnic Differences,” Edge (2009), https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10376.
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reality is demonstrable in the observation that the genetic ability to digest lactose is only
reality is demonstrable in the observation that the genetic ability to digest lactose is only