Decolonizing the civic/ethnic binary

Abstract

The founding works of nationalism theory identify two overarching categories of nationalism: civic and ethnic. While the former is lauded as liberal, inclusive, and rational, the latter is derided as regressive, restrictive, and exclusionary. More recent work on nationalism has problematized these characterizations, but has largely retained the civic/ethnic binary. This article critiques the civic/ethnic binary from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Drawing on de Sousa Santos’s abyssal line and Fanon’s zones of being and non-being, the article argues that the relationship between metropolis and empire is foundational to the relationship between civic and ethnic nationalism. Yet the category of civic nationalism obscures racialized patterns of exclusion within civic nations, such that the standards of inclusion within a civic nation are constructed on the basis of excluding the nation’s Others. Because civic nationalism is predicated on the creation and denial of Others, presenting civic nationalism as a global ideal is impossible. The article concludes by considering the promise of transnational social movements in the global South as an answer to both civic and ethnic nationalism.

Conflict in Catalonia: A Sociological Approximation

“…For a recent insightful critique of the ethnic-civic binary, seeTinsley (2018). For a critique of the usefulness of this binary in the context of Catalonia, seeMiley (2007).…”

Bringing the State Back into the Sociology of Nationalism: The Persona Ficta Is Political

“…In a radically unequal world, it will be particularly important to comparatively analyse variation by state and region, by relatively sovereign and more dependent states. Further research will also therefore benefit from recent insights provided by post-colonial genealogies of nationalism and the modern state (Bennett, 2018; Bhambra, 2017; Tinsley, 2019).…”

“…Rather than being founded upon civic principles voluntarily adhered to by successive generations these inheritances are evidently very substantially cultural, arguably 'ethnic'. Accounts of the emergence of these states' 'civic' norms also imply a developmentally more advanced North, to which 'the rest' should aspire, while shrouding their exploitative colonial origins, not least in relation to transatlantic slavery (Tinsley, 2019).…”

“…. a ready-made counterpoint’, while Tinsley (2019: 359) suggests that progressive political hopes lie ‘in global social movements that transcend the idea of the nation’. Such accounts are explicitly anti-nationalist and often implicitly anti-statist, through a commitment to strengthening politics ‘outside the purview of the state’s institutions and its matrices of power and control’ (Walia, 2013: 11).…”

Postcolonial Possibilities for the Sociology of Race

“…If there is a core imperial ethnic group, “it is from the empire that they get their sense of themselves, their identity” (p. 4). Tinsley (forthcoming) takes the matter even further, arguing that the founding idea of “civil” nationalism itself is a product of colonial relations.…”