Quote:
Originally Posted by Stealhead
I'd say technically you are what ever the nation in which you hold citizenship is. In other words a Canadian citizen is a Canadian, Russian citizen is a Russian. Of course every nation has a dominate culture as well and one can be a citizen but not necessarily be a part of the majority(controlling power/group). Ethnicity is another can of worms at the end of the day there are no nations on earth in which every single citizen is ethnically the same.
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Of course it's a can of worms, but this is a very Western way of looking at nationality, and here is something you need to realize:
The very concept of "nationality", legally and constitutionally, means something totally different in former Soviet space than it does in the West. It dates back to a Soviet-era response to Imperial-era problems, and basically it boils down to a section in the passport that says "nationality" - and by the way, that was retained in most former Soviet republics and is still there today. Nationality is ethnic-based identity that one gets partially by choice, inheriting it from one (but not both) of their parents. It is not the same as citizenship, at all. For many people in Russia, that section of their passport might say "Russian", but it might also say "Tatar", "Chuvash", "Jew", "Ukrainian", "Belarus", "Chechen", etc. etc. No sane people in post-Soviet space (I don't count ultra-nationalists as that) would even bat an eyelid at someone who is identified as being Tatar or Chuvash or Jewish in their Russian passport, that's just a normal thing. Same for Ukrainian. Same for someone who identifies as Russian living in the Ukraine. That is how things always were. The nuance is totally lost also, because while in English we say "Russian", in Russian there are actually two completely different words: "Russkiy" indicating someone of Russian nationality, and "Rossiyanin" indicating someone of Russian citizenship. Those two terms are not in any way equivalent, and there is no contradiction in that.
Nationality (or "nationality", because it means something totally different there than it does for Western commentators) is a big part of this whole issue and debate that gets totally lost here.