ABSTRACT
The concept of ethnicity has been an important issue in the debate on the character of nationalism since it is fundamentally concerned with national identity and national feeling. The link between ethnicity and political status arose from the movement towards national self-determination in European societies and the development of nation-states in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the course of this process many came to believe that ethnicity was a biological attribute, immutable and exclusive to the group sharing the same genetic characteristics and providing the basis of a national identity. Such a deterministic approach, with its emphasis on biological factors, provided a simplistic explanation of ethnic difference and its very simplicity offered an attractive solution to what was and continues to be a much more complex problem.
