NATIONAL IDENTITIES 535 citizenship attribution policies. As a result, ethnonationalist politicians can use descent, cultural proximity or the knowledge of the official language as formally civic tools in ethnic nation building projects. The paper has also shown that cultural preferentialism is an inherent part of citizenship policy. Despite the normative dilemmas related to naturalization standards, selectivity on the basis of language and cultural knowledge is an integral part of citizenship attribution not only in putatively ‘ethnic’ citizenship regimes, but also in ‘civic’ ones. Similarly, unrestricted jus sanguinis citizenship acquisition is also legislated in all European states. As in the case of preferential naturalization on the grounds of cultural proximity, descent of former citizens is not a marker of thick ethnic belonging. Restoration of citizenship of descendants of former citizens is also available for individuals who cannot be considered as ‘ethnic kin’ in sociocultural terms. The paper has pointed out that, paradoxically, the efforts of nationalist politicians to strengthen the ethnic homogeneity through offering fast-track citizenship for non-resident ‘ethnic kin’ often results in citizenship for individuals who do not see themselves as ethnic kin, and do not even speak the national language. Inevitably, the more simple and unconstrained the passing down of citizenship, and the less birthright citizenship is tied to territory, the less citizenship becomes a marker of factual, genuine stakeholding in a country. But at the same time, it may not necessarily become more ‘ethnic’ – on the contrary, unrestricted jus sanguinis makes citizenship available for foreign born individuals even if they have no genuine ties or even loose cultural ties to their ‘homelands’. Therefore, policies which are often labeled as ‘ethnic’ in citizenship scholarship do not at all in practice facilitate the cultural homogeneity of nation-states, but rather water it down. To put it tersely, ethnically framed citizenship policies may not be ‘ethnic’ either in their legal operationalization or their social impact. Bearing all this in mind, one can agree with Max Weber that because of this conceptual ambiguity, ethnicity is not a salient category of analysis. As Weber put it, as soon as we approach the concept of ethnicity with analytical scrutiny, it becomes redundant and unnecessary – ‘it dissolves if we define our terms exactly’ (Weber, 1978, p. 62). Acknowledgements This publication is the result of research conducted for Central European University, Private University – CEU GmbH. It was made possible by the CEU Open Access Fund. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by project Legal Approaches to Operationalize Nationality and Ethnicity [grant number NFKI 13496]. Notes on contributor Szabolcs Pogonyi is Associate Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University.