NATIONAL IDENTITIES 525 belonging to the nation (Goodman, 2015; Michalowski, 2011). While ethnic regimes want to strengthen the ethnocultural homogeneity of the political community by maintaining the congruence of ethnocultural (national) and legal (citizenship) membership, in civic/ territorial regimes there is no such link assumed between ethnicity and citizenship. More nuanced approaches that goes beyond the above one-dimensional conceptualization acknowledges that ethnic citizenship regimes may use overinclusive acquisition rules to strengthen national homogeneity. Such regimes make it difficult for individuals who do not belong to the titular majority to obtain citizenship, while at the same time they offer fast-track facilitated citizenship to co-ethnic who live abroad (Dumbrava, 2014; Vink & Bauböck, 2013). In general, ethnic citizenship regimes tend to have more restrictive acquisition policies making naturalization more complicated for individuals outside the titular ethnic group. Strict language requirements and complicated citizenship tests are broadly considered as examples of ethnically restrictive acquisition measures. In contrast with ethnic regimes, civic citizenship frameworks are associated with acquisition policies that are less focused on the maintenance of putative ethnocultural homogeneity. These typologies go beyond the traditional understanding of the civic–ethnic distinction by highlighting that not only ethnically restrictive policies, but also overinclusive citizenship based on ethnic preferentialism may serve illiberal political aims. The comparative analysis of citizenship policies along the two-dimensional (ethnic v. civic/territorial; inclusive v. exclusive) also shows that most countries have both civic and ethnic citizenship laws, and due to the convergence of these laws (at least in the EU (Vink & de Groot, 2010)), there is only a gradational variation rather than clear-cut categorical difference between ethnic or civic types (Brubaker, 2016, p. 103). Similarly to nationalism studies, in comparative citizenship studies, the civic–ethnic distinction is a normatively loaded typology. As mentioned above, the civic v. ethnic label is often used as a synonym for inclusive/liberal and exclusive/illiberal citizenship regimes (Goodman, 2014; Oers, 2014). In this interpretation, liberal civic citizenship policies are intended to restore the congruence of territorial boundaries and membership (regardless of the ethnic background of citizens), while ethnic acquisition policies prioritize the creation of an ethnoculturally homogeneous political community. Such ethnically – or even racially – tinted citizenship acquisition policies in most immigration countries that offered preferential treatment for specific, mostly white immigrants. For example, in Australia, Canada and New Zealand such measures were in place to maintain British domination by offering membership to British citizens and, at the same time, excluding non-white immigrants as well as members of indigenous minorities (Mann, 2017, 2019). In post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Southeast Europe, citizenship policies were used for ethnic engineering through the exclusion of resident ethnic minorities and the inclusion of non-resident ethnic kin-populations (Agarin & Karolewski, 2015; Bauböck et al., 2007; Liebich, 2009). The denial of citizenship from territorially present ethnic minorities resulted in the creation of large stateless individuals in the Baltics as well as Southeast Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Pogonyi et al., 2010; Stiks, 2015). The newly restored states launched nation building projects that aimed at strengthening the political and social dominance of titular majorities that, in some cases, were only in slight majority. The exclusion of ethnic minorities present in the territory is normatively even more problematic than the exclusion of settled immigrants and their descendants from citizenship in Western European and North American immigration states.