Nationalism and ethnicity : definition and history of the concept of nationalism

![CDATA[A dual approach to nationalism that first emerged in the nineteenth century also remains firmly embedded in scholarship and nationalist practices today. Nationalism in its many forms across the globe, from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Americas, has at its core both an ethnic (cultural) and civic (political) component, combining culture, language, ancestry, and religion with institutional, geopolitical, economic, ideological, and social processes of inclusion and exclusion. While the emphasis classically has been on ethnic or civic forms of nationalism, there is now a growing consensus in nationalism studies that no type of nationalism is mutually exclusive and, equally, one form can influence or borrow from another. Moreover, it is possible to see this shift toward mutually inclusive forms of nationalism in the light of another paradigmatic shift from content to process: rather than being a static set of ideas, nationalism can instead be defined as a set of processes, of invented traditions in the Hobsbawmian sense and ‘imagined communities’ in the famous phrase of Benedict Anderson. Finally, a third related tension between universalism and exceptionalism can be observed in a shift away from the claims of post–World War II scholars, who explained violence and genocide as products of deviant or exceptional forms of nationalism, toward comparative and transnational approaches that break down the exceptionalism paradigm. The following sections will summarize the main contributions of scholarship on nationalism by discussing each of these three tensions—ethnic versus civic, static versus process, and universalist versus exceptionalist—and linking them to key concepts such as citizenship, nationality, and the state.]]