Nationalism is ostensibly a term which covers such elements as national consciousness, the expression of national identity and loyalty to the nation - ‘nation’ itself being defined by Timothy Bancroft as:

“…a group of people identified as sharing any number of perceived or real characteristics – such as common ancestry, language, religion, culture, historical traditions and shared territory – the members of which can identify themselves and others as belonging to the group, united through some form of organisation, most often political.”

Bancroft, Timothy. Nationalism in Europe: 1789-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1999. p3

This essay will briefly examine the concept of civic and ethnic nationalism, attempting to highlight some of the contrasting aspects while, at the same time, examining connections between the two ideologies as each strives for the establishment, retention or advancement of a nation state.

Civic nationalism is generally seen to be exercised in the areas in which there already exists a civil society, i.e. a group of people, each having a feeling of belonging to the same community, who are governed by and respect t

“… one of the main reasons why democracy failed in ECE [East Central Europe] during the inter-war period…”

Adams, Ian. Political Ideology Today. Manchester University Press, 1996. p86

Crawford stresses the intrinsic link between democracy and civic nationalism, but warns of the dangers of the playing of a dominant role by ethnic nationalism in societies with weak civic cultures, citing the predominance of ethnic nationalism as:

If wishing to examine the case in which civic and ethnic nationalism are exercised in parallel, one need look no further than India. Gaining freedom from centuries of British rule in 1947, India was split up into two nations: India and Pakistan. Credit for the sub-continent’s independence is mainly attributed to the Indian National Congress, a multi-caste and class coalition formed in the 1890s, which led a mass movement against British imperialism. However, in the early years leading up to independence, as the struggle against colonialism intensified and liberation seemed close at hand, the Muslims, a minority community comprising roughly a quarter of the total population, began to feel increasingly nervous about their prospects in a Hindu-dominated free India. The Muslim elite feared that upper-caste Hindus in the Congress would subjugate and deny them their legitimate place in the nation's power structure. They hence began demands for a separate nation for themselves.

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