has thus proved problematic. As Nieguth (163) notes, the term “ethnic” implicitly conflates two dimensions that should be distinguished: ancestry and culture.
The contrast of civic and ethnic has also left scholars confused about membership in non-national polities. As we have seen, Kohn distinguished two understandings of the nation, and his successors have continued to divide ideas of political belonging into two types: civic and ethnic nationalism. But what of non-national political collectivities and the visions of belonging associated with them? Whether visions of political membership can be extended to kinds of states other than those in which they originate, and the extent to which non-national political experiences might be relevant for nation-states, is another point of confusion associated with the current literature (cf. Xenos 1996; Viroli 1995; Schaar 1981).
The confusions, puzzles, and problems to which the contrast between civic and ethnic gives rise are largely conceptual in origin. The Kohnian approach has been widely echoed by politicians, political leaders, journalists, and political commentators. But its apparent contradictions and conceptual confusions indicate a need for better analytical tools.
Some thinkers may object to developing a typology of views of “citizenship and nationality” together, on grounds that these are two different concepts. McCrone and Kiely (2000), for instance, argue strongly that “nationality and citizenship actually belong to different spheres of meaning and activity” (25). It is probably somewhat too simple, however, to define “nationality” exclusively as “a cultural concept which binds people on the basis of shared identity” while reserving “citizenship” for the “political concept deriving from people’s relationship to the state” as these authors suggest (25).
Such a distinction may be especially problematic if one is seeking a conceptual framework suitable for comparative research. It is important to recognize that the relationship between citizenship and nationality has itself varied, and that some nations have historically been more “political” and less “cultural” than others. The difference between the two terms is consequently much less clear-cut than McCrone and Kiely suggest. What of Schnapper’s (1994) discussion of the modern “nation” as “community of citizens,” for example? This inclusive vision of the nation should not be too hastily dismissed as a product of mere terminological confusion. Moreover, as Albrow and O’Byrne (2000) point out, globalization is not just weakening the connection between nations and states (76–79). Insofar as it involves “transnational definitions of public goods,” it also serves as a reminder of the potential disjunction that has always existed between the state and citizenship, or between good citizenship and duty to a particular state (71–73).
Part of the problem is McCrone and Kiely’s primary focus on Britain, where the concepts of state and nation have remained unusually distinct. The clear-cut division suggested by the British case is somewhat at odds with the authors’ own discussion of how the two ideas were historically compounded elsewhere as state boundaries came to define national ones, and vice versa (27–29). Discussions of “nationality” are often confused precisely because the term has come to refer to both “nationhood” and formal, legal membership as granted and recognized by the state. We might be tempted to call the latter “legal citizenship” rather than “nationality.” Caution is in order here, however: the French law specifying who qualifies for such a status is, for example, called le code de la nationalité française, and French discussions of nationalité have concerned both “nation-ness” and what McCrone and Kiely would call “citizenship.” Even in Britain, recent discussions of what it means to be “British,” notably those touched off by the Rushdie affair, have given involved membership both in the nation and in the state.
As these examples suggest, citizenship and nationality today cannot be distinguished as neatly as one might wish. McCrone and Kiely may well be right that “nation-ness and state-ness need not be, and increasingly are not, aligned” (2000: 25). However, concepts are forged by long histories of usage, not current conditions alone, and nations and states have in many cases historically redefined one another. Because many debates have been shapted by conceptions of both nationality and citizenship, and because the distinction varies from one country to another and is often itself politically contested, we need a typology covering both conceptions of citizenship and nationality.
Fortunately, even if we are not content simply to take individual debates, or those of each particular country, “on their own terms,” there is another classificatory schema at our disposal. Despite the ubiquity in the scholarly literature of the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, it is not the only available way of categorizing conceptions of political membership. As Chapter 2 shows, we actually already know another way of systematically distinguishing different ways of thinking about membership. Using methods originating in ordinary language philosophy to analyze our usual ways of talking about memberships in different kinds of groups suggests a new, more theoretically refined framework.
Chapter 2
What We Talk About When We Talk About Belonging: A New Framework for Analyzing Political Controversies
The Discreet Existence of an Ordinary Language Typology of Memberships
As we have seen, the contrast between civic and ethnic is conceptually problematic in a number of ways. However, comparative study of the politics of belonging does require some kind of overarching conceptual framework for identifying and comparing ideas of citizenship and national membership that emerge in different times and places. Moreover, without an external analytical framework through which to interpret the stakes of particular national controversies, there is little chance of political actors gaining critical distance on current events. In the absence of a clear alternative, the continued influence of the contrast between civic and ethnic in comparative politics, whatever its conceptual limitations, is not surprising.
Drawing on methods and insights from ordinary language philosophy, this chapter shows that this is actually not the only way we know how to distinguish between different kinds of membership. In reality, we already have another, more subtle and precise way of categorizing memberships, one that informs the way we talk about them in ordinary English. This alternative, “ordinary language” approach to classifying and categorizing memberships is at least as orderly and systematic as the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, and permits a variety of distinctions that simpler, dichotomous approaches have tended to conceal.
The way we discuss membership in our ordinary speech is more orderly and systematic than it might first appear. The surprisingly systematic way in which we unreflectingly classify memberships is apparent in the way we normally choose verbs to discuss voluntary terminations of membership in various groups. As we shall see, the pattern underlying our ordinary choice of verbs in this area is not arbitrary or isolated. It is reflected also in the way we discuss entering and involuntarily exiting from different kinds of groups. In fact, in choosing verbs that sound right when we talk about these aspects of various forms of memberships, we are already semiconsciously classifying all memberships into five basic categories.These five types of belonging in fact correspond to five distinct ways of understanding political membership. Ordinary language analysis thus suggests an alternative theoretical framework for examining and comparing public debates on citizenship and nationality, including those triggered by reactions to immigration and its long-term effects.
Memberships: Some You Cancel, Some You Quit, Some You Leave, Some You Change, and Some from Which There Is No Escape
Voluntary Terminations of Membership
In discussing voluntary termination of a given membership, not just any verb will do. In English, we have what at first appears to be a vast array of verbs from which to choose for this. A closer examination of this long preliminary list, however,
