524 S. POGONYI scholarly understanding of social phenomena requires analytical tools and methods through which correlations, typologies and patterns can be hypothesized and tested. By identifying qualitatively different forms of nationalist politics, scholars hoped that they can predict the nature and intensity of future conflicts. Scholarly analyses comparing and explaining variations in nationalisms relied on the ‘ethnic’ versus ‘civic’ typology in order to explain two qualitatively different modalities of nationalist mobilization and sentiments. The bifurcation of nationalist politics into civic and ethnic branches was originally intended to contrast ethnic, violence prone ‘Eastern’ nationalisms with civic, integrationist and progressive ‘Western’ nationalisms (Kennedy & Ginderachter, n.d.). More recently, the binary opposition of ethnic and civic nationalism has received ample criticism. Scholars have argued that social organization based on conceived ethnic proximity is no less constructed than civic types of association, and ethnic nations that seem pristine are often recent constructs (Anderson, 2006; Deutsch, 1953; E. Hobsbawm, 1992). In line with Max Weber’s ideas, it has been argued that ethnic identity is not natural. As Weber put it, the belief in common ethnic descent is itself the result of political action (Weber, 1978). Ethnos, understood as a putative blood community, is a ‘political artefact’ created and sustained by memories of joint political action in the past. Ethnosymbolist interpretations, on the other hand, claim that even Western ‘civic’ nations had ethnic cores (Smith, 1991), and therefore, to some extent, all nations are ‘ethnic’. It has also been pointed out by various scholars that civic identity is an inherited cultural artifact, as much as ethnic identity. The idea that Western’ nations are constructed along a ‘civic’ model of statehood has also been contested.(Kuzio, 2002) In seminal essays, Bernard Yack (Beiner & Yack, 1999), Will Kymlicka (Kymlicka, 1999) and Rogers Brubaker (Brubaker, 2004) have pointed out that the civic–ethnic dichotomy is often used in order to distinguish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalisms. Thus, the civic–ethnic distinction serves normative, ideological and political purposes rather than informing analytical thinking. Despite its conceptual and semantic ambiguity, the civic–ethnic distinction is still widely considered as the most important comparative tool in contemporary citizenship studies. In a groundbreaking early analysis that grounded contemporary comparative citizenship studies Brubaker showed how historical path dependencies impact citizenship attribution policies (Brubaker, 1992). Brubaker pointed out that the German citizenship model defined citizenship by ethnocultural terms, while in France, citizenship was defined in territorial terms and was marked by civic incorporation rules. Following this distinction, the civic–ethnic binary opposition has been broadly applied to highlight the different patterns of specific citizenship acquisition policies as well as the normatively distinct types of citizenship regimes (Bauböck et al., 2006, 2007; Brubaker, 1992; Howard, 2009; Pogonyi et al., 2010; Vink & Bauböck, 2013). In this conceptual framework, ethnic citizenship is marked by jus sanguinis citizenship legislation. According to this classification, in ethnic regimes citizenship is inherited, and belonging to the political community is conditional upon membership in the core ethnocultural group. Civic or territorial citizenship, on the other hand, links legal membership to genuine political and social ties, and, at least, in its ideal type, assigns citizenship to those who can be considered as ‘stakeholders’ (Bauböck, 2007) – those individuals whose well-being is inherently linked to the specific political community (Bauböck, 2019). Thus, in civic citizenship regimes, citizenship at birth is attributed through the jus soli principle, and naturalization is conditional on the acceptance of basic political norms rather than putative ethnic