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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Critical Review
Civic Nationalism: Oxymoron?
By Nicholas Xenos
Abstract
Recent attempts to distinguish a normatively acceptable "civic nationalism" -- as distinct from an irrationally tainted "ethnic nationalism" -- have failed to take seriosly the implications of the transition from the city as the immediate spatial unit of the patria to the more abstract national state that replaced it. The nation-state has required a mythologizing naturalism to legitimize it, thus blurring the distinction between "civic" and "ethnic." The urban political experience of the patria is lost to us; cosmopolitan intellectuals should resist the comforting temptation to recover it in the nation, and should recognize civic nationalism for the oxymoron it is.