Can We Really Distinguish Between Civic and National Solidarity?

Abstract

While this book centers on national rather than civic attachments, Chapter Six calls attention to the fact that when it comes to the question of solidarity (as opposed to identity), the two are not easily distinguishable beyond the symbolic cultural level. Reviewing other prominent bottom-up approaches to mass solidarity, it is shown how from a phenomenological and empirical point of view the analytic distinction between civic and national solidarity is too often overstated. The chapter goes on to address the critic of methodological nationalism and the normative bias that distinguishes between “good” civic and “bad” national attachment. This warrants a reconsideration of the contractual-civic model of nationalism (civic nationalism) too easily dismissed by recent scholars.