ABSTRACT
Not every dictionary lists all characteristics for both concepts: in American, English, and German dictionaries, for instance, nationality is not thought to be “recognizable by looks,” and the idea of a “community of destiny” is more common in the Latin languages such as French and Spanish than in the Germanic ones such as Dutch and Swedish. Yet every dictionary consulted lists at least five of the criteria, and the lists run in parallel except for the criteria of political or state organization. The homology is striking, but the explanation is simple. Since modern nation-states arose in the West, roughly from 1500 AD onward, they had to overcome the boundaries of ethnicity among their citizens, and they did so by turning the nation into a superethnos. The nation is thus both postethnic, in that it denies the salience of old ethnic distinctions and portrays these as a matter of a dim and distant prestate past, and superethnic, in that it portrays the nation as a new and bigger kind of ethnos. Most nation-states, however, have failed to complete this project in that they included some ethnic groups and excluded others, or privileged some and marginalized others. It is precisely this exclusion that turns numbers of people into “minorities” and thereby creates the key problem between the nation-state and the multicultural project. Every nation-state has one superethnos, called the Germans, the French, or the American
Dictionary Definitions of “Ethnic Group” and “Nation”
people, whose members think they have founded it or should have a special role in running it. To be truly postethnic, that is, truly inclusive, the nation-state would have to cease constructing its nation as a superethnos. A multicultural nation-state is, in some ways, a contradiction in terms.
