ABSTRACT
Recently, it has been very fashionable to define German citizenship as ethnic citizenship and French citizenship as a civic one (Dumont 1994, Brubaker 1992). Civic citizenship defines belonging on the basis of participation through rights and obligations. Ethnic citizenship on the other hand denotes community-based notions of belonging through particularistic identities. Even though this categorization may have analytical appeal in understanding the ways that self-definitions of nations differ, I do not see these two components (rights on the one hand, and identities on the other) as profound differentiating factors across national citizenships.
