Significant others and the importance of ancestry for Czech national identity

ABSTRACT

Nations are viewed as metaphorical families having common ancestors. Czechs, for example, share the legend about a forefather Čech who brought his people into Czechia. Analysing the Czech ISSP 2013 data we examine how the importance of having Czech descent depends on Christian denomination, openness towards immigration, perceived commonality with ‘significant Others’, foreign-born parents, and socio-demographics. Results of the analysis suggest that Czech ancestry is less important part of national identity among younger cohorts, people living in big cities and towns, descendants of foreign-born parents, and people who are in favour of immigration from poor countries outside the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• ancestry
• immigration
• citizenship
• Czech Republic
• ISSP 2013

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank to all anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Klára Vlachová is head of the research team Value Orientations in Society at the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Her research deals with the sociology of politics, particularly political values, ideas and attitudes, voting behaviour, and national identity. From 2001 she has been the Czech European Social Survey National Coordinator.

Notes

1. However, factor-analytic explorations of standard measures tapping the perceived importance of ethno-cultural and civic traits in defining nationhood do tend to produce two latent dimensions that are highly correlated (Jones & Smith, 2001b; Wright, Citrin, & Wand, 2012). The items that should reflect the civic and ethnic components of national identity have different meanings in different countries (Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010). The items employed in comparative surveys are not well-suited to capture the distinction between ethnic and civic views of national identity (Wright, 2011). Every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements (Smith, 1991; Kuzio, 2002). The traditional civic-West/ethnic-East argument is a gross simplification of the concepts of nationhood (Shulman, 2002).

2. Most aristocratic families living in Czech lands after 1627 were not Czech by origin. They usurped the confiscated lands of Protestants, but their later descendants accepted an identity with the ‘Lands of the Crown Bohemia’ (Hroch, 2004, p. 96).

3. A mythical founder of the Polish nation.

4. Chronicle of Bohemians (twelfth century, Latin), Chronicle of Dalimil (fourteenth century, Czech).

5. Carpathian Ruthenia was a region in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia. It became autonomous in September 1938 and was immediately invaded and annexed by Hungary. It was invaded by the Soviet Red Army in 1944 and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1946.

6. Later on, some of the Hungarians were allowed to return back to Slovakia. Part of the Greek emigrés returned home in the 1980s of the twentieth century.

7. Ancestry is the key item for measuring the ethnic dimension of national identity and it is expected that it means much the same in different countries (Ford et al., 2011). However, some countries including the Czech Republic show evidence of having distinct ethnic and civic dimensions with ancestry loading powerfully on both (Heath et al., 2009).

8. Exclusionism shared by older respondents is supported also by the analyses of Dražanová (2015).

9. Southern and Eastern Germans, and Austrians.

10. Yellow outside, white inside (i.e. different appearance, the same lifestyle) (Souralová, 2016, p. 121).

11. See http://www.radio.cz/en/section/special/being-a-banana-child.

12. It was not possible to use an ordinal regression model. The result of a test of parallelism showed that the relationship between the independent variables and the logits was not the same for all the logits.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic [grant number LG12023].