there is no country that has consistently practiced an "if you want to be one of us you can be" civic nationalism, and, perhaps more spicily, there are very few countries that haven't
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Most countries in Latin America have been quite consistent on civic nationalism, and in Brazil+southern cone assimilation has been so widespread, aggressive even, that any form of ethnic belonging is often seen as anathema to national identity
"We will assimilate you whether you want it or not, and if you resist it's because you're embarrassed of us/think your ancestors are better than us/want to stand out" is the unspoken message most of the times.
I can honestly think of only a few countries that would unconditionally argue that you can never become one of them and they are genuinely extreme cases.
Extreme cases even on an existing continuum of immigrant acceptance - Serbia has much latent racism etc but the Chinese who move here and get lucky REALLY get lucky which is out of proportion with what you'd assume
One genuine exception is classical Sparta, which is why the Spartiate population diminished over time to just a couple of hundred people by the time it was conquered with barely a fight.
IIRC, Greek polises usually had no actual way of gaining citizenship through birth; I believe Athens could do it through a special act of the Assembly, but that was an individual honor. Sparta was insane because you LOST citizenship if you fell below the prescribed income level.
***except through birth. There was no naturalization process, and usually being born to resident "foreigners" didn't count either, which is why places like Athens had such large metic populations.
Yeah, Sparta was an extreme outlier in that even at its height, its full citizen population was <10% of the population whereas in most Greek cities it was more like 30-50%.
Interestingly, on this the rabid nationalists are more "liberal" than the non-nationalist ultra-Orthodox. A common alignment between the liberal center and the National Religious against the ultra-Orthodox is to make conversion less burdensome (including for non-Jewish Israeli citizens).
I noticed a while back that the Israeli nationalist identity just has less and less to do with Judaism, and that includes the Ben gvir types usually called the "religious" right. But all they have to do with the religion politically is parading it as justification for ethnic supremacism?
Of course it's nothing new or unique, but one example is my Ukrainian-Jewish Israeli mother who has absolutely nothing to do with the religion, but is a straight up frothing at the mouth ultranationalist when you get down to it. The ethnoreligion is more just ethno
Secular ultranationalism is of course a very stereotypical Russophone Jewish political stance. Secular ideas of Jewish identity tend to be left-coded in Israel.
I mean. Yes? This is the entire idea of secular Zionism ("We are a people - *one* people"). While "pure" secular variants are a minority view in Israel, generally Zionism views Jewishness as an ethnic identity that happens to be associated with a religion.
(With recognition of non-Orthodox conversions backed by hardline secularists. Zero ideological coherence there, but a practical step to their ideal of decoupling "Hebrew"/Israeli-Jewish national identity from Jewish religious identity.)
(Going by the Mylonas and Tudor definitions, I'd say that Israeli-Jewish national identity is less ascriptive than, say, Japanese or Korean national identity, but much more so than French or contemporary Ukrainian.)
In a country of 1.4B, they have like 1400 nationalized citizens, there is no pathway to citizenship, there is no way to claim PRC citizenship through a family member, but for some reason their state mouthpieces also tell the diaspora they will never be accepted anywhere else
Yeah, the closest to the absolute norm of "you will never be one of us unless you meet very specific characteristics" that I can think of is the PRC, Korea, Japan and Israel.
we have roughly the same diaspora relations as china does (one of the poems that we learn in primary school that is remembered the most has the verse 'homeland, each person only has one/like there is only one mother/homeland, whoever does not remember/can never grow up to be human')
I'd add that japan has mildly liberalized some of its laws recently in recognition of the profound aging issues but the general cultural bias shows no sign of eroding anytime soon
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