From the New York Review of Books:
French nationalism contained the seeds of something very different from English nationalism. Greenfeld places English and American nationalism on a spectrum that runs from individualist, voluntary civic nationalism at one end to “ethnonationalism” at the other, the latter being hereditary, nonvoluntary, and anti-individualistic. In this classification, French nationalism was in the beginning largely civic and individualistic but became more collectivist as the eighteenth century went on. In contrast to Anglo-American nationalism, it subordinated the autonomous individual to the one and indivisible nation. It nonetheless remained voluntarist, in the sense that to be French is a matter of committing yourself to being French, and that is open to foreigners under appropriate conditions. Conversely, one can cease to be French by emigrating.
It was Russian nationalism that introduced what became ethnonationalism. Nationalism beyond England begins in resentment—ressentiment is Greenfeld’s term, reflecting its semi-technical, sociological meaning, which refers to the envy a society may feel for the achievements of some other society or societies. Envy may result in two different responses. The first is an attempt to emulate the envied society; the second is a denigration of it and an assertion of the superiority of the envious society. Because France was culturally secure, resentment was not an enduring feature of French nationalism. Russia was quite different. Emulation proving impossible, Russians took refuge in asserting that a spiritual Russian culture was superior to Western European rationalism. This made national identity a natural, or biological, rather than a political matter. The impact in due course on German racism, Greenfeld assumes, is obvious enough.
