# Ethnonationalism The doctrine that the nation is defined by **shared ethnicity** — common descent, blood, language, culture, and ancestral homeland — rather than by shared citizenship, civic values, or political consent. Ethnonationalism (or *ethnic nationalism*) holds that the legitimate political community is the *ethnos*, that a state ideally belongs to and serves one ethnic people, and that ethnic outsiders are at best guests and at worst threats to the nation's continuity. It stands opposed to **civic nationalism**, in which membership is defined by allegiance to institutions and principles open in theory to anyone regardless of origin. ## Core claims The ethnonationalist position bundles several commitments that usually travel together: **Descent over consent.** The nation is something one is *born into*, not something one *joins*. Naturalization, assimilation, and birthright citizenship are viewed with suspicion because they admit the wrong kind of member. **Homogeneity as a good.** Ethnic and cultural homogeneity is treated as the natural and healthy condition of a polity; diversity is framed as a source of friction, distrust, and eventual conflict rather than strength. **Demographic stakes.** Because the nation is an ethnic body, its survival is measured demographically — birth rates, immigration flows, and the ethnic composition of the population become existential political questions. This is the soil in which conspiracy frames like the [[Great Replacement Theory]] grow. **Land and peoplehood.** A recurring romantic motif (the German *Blut und Boden*, [[Blood and Soil]]) fuses a people to a specific territory, treating the homeland as the inalienable property of the ethnic nation. ## The civic / ethnic distinction Scholars (notably Hans Kohn and later Rogers Brubaker) drew a long-standing contrast between "Western" civic nationalism and "Eastern" ethnic nationalism. The distinction is analytically useful but imperfect: most real nationalisms blend the two, and "civic" nationalisms have often smuggled in ethnic assumptions about who *really* belongs. Ethnonationalism's contemporary appeal lies precisely in collapsing the distinction — insisting that civic membership without ethnic kinship is a fiction or a betrayal. ## In the contemporary right Ethnonationalism is a load-bearing structure beneath much of the modern far and dissident right tracked in this knowledge base. It supplies the underlying logic of [[White Nationalism]] (ethnonationalism with "white" as the relevant ethnos), connects to the immigration-restrictionism and identitarian themes of [[Paleoconservatism]], and overlaps — but does not coincide — with [[Christian Nationalism]] (which centers a religious rather than strictly ethnic identity, though the two frequently fuse). The European *Identitarian* movement repackages ethnonationalism in the softer-sounding vocabulary of [[Ethnopluralism]] ("a place for every people, every people in its place"), which preserves the demand for ethnic separation while avoiding explicit hierarchy. ## Distinct from neighbors - **Civic nationalism** — membership by allegiance and principle, not descent; the direct antithesis. - **[[White Nationalism]]** — a specific racial application of ethnonationalist logic. - **[[Ethnopluralism]]** — the "separate but rooted" rebranding that launders ethnonationalist separation as respect for diversity. - **[[Economic Nationalism]]** — protection of the national economy; can accompany ethnonationalism but is conceptually independent (one can be an economic nationalist on civic grounds). - **[[Christian Nationalism]]** — fuses national identity with religion rather than ethnicity, though in practice the two are often welded together. ## See Also - [[White Nationalism]] - [[Great Replacement Theory]] - [[Ethnopluralism]] - [[Paleoconservatism]] - [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Economic Nationalism]] - [[White Supremacy Lexicon]] - [[Ideologies Hub]]