ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the concepts of ethnicity and national identity should be defined without legal characteristics. Thus, ethnic groups or nations are different entities from states; they are groups with a special kind of cultural identity. The chapter examines ethnic groups with very little compactness: races or linguistic families and looks at ethnic cleavages and ethnic structure. In the theory of nation-building one encounters the concept of an ethnic core. The literature on national identity is very large, no doubt because scholars tend to take different opinions about the nature of national identity. The different ways in which the special nature of national identities can be evaluated emerge when one reads the debate between two experts on nationalism, G. Kedourie and E. Gellner. National identity poses not only questions about how to conceptualize this type of cultural orientation, based on ethnicity, but also problems of how to measure this phenomenon.
