AVOIDING THE DETAILS:

The matter is that I can see no reason in principle why an ethnostate cannot be a democracy; the devil is in the details. Quick 'Democracy 101' recap: every democratic government on earth (as well as not a few non-democratic ones), claims to derive its legitimate authority from the people. One way or another, the machinery of government is authorized by the collective body of citizens, aka "the people." This is also known as "popular sovereignty." As there is no a priori way of determining what sort of body that will be, you can have a basically civic understanding of it, in which citizens are primarily bound by their living under common laws (e.g., the United States) or a more ethnic one, in which they also enjoy the bonds of a common pre-political ethnicity and way of life (e.g., Japan). One is not necessarily more "legitimate" than the other. And of course even civic nations are going to end up wanting to define themselves in some more specific way than "a random bunch of individuals who happen to reside on a shared territory while claiming similar rights and prerogatives," etc. Thus, non-Americans have a perhaps-cliched but still reasonably robust idea of what Americans are like.

Conversely, even ethnostates are a kind of imagined community (in the case of Israel, imagining that the descendants of both Iraqi and Polish Jews ultimately share more in common than not--or at least enough to enjoy common citizenship in a state dedicated to that shared identity).

One can say of course (as Freddie does) that ethnic identities are in conflict with the universalist premises of modern liberal democracies, in a way that civic nations aren't, but I don't think this is right. If they are to function at all, even civic nations founded on universalist claims still have to make particular discriminations in ways that can seem historically arbitrary. For example, if you trace your family back to the mid-19th century American Southwest, then whether you are today a citizen of the United States or Mexico will have a lot to do with which side of various lines your ancestors found themselves at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. And I am not even getting into all the inevitable ways that civic nations fail to live up to their universalist claims in practice--slavery and institutionalized racial hierarchies plus the general treatment of the First Nations being just the most egregious ones in the U.S. case.

Today, the most obvious sticking point here is immigration, in which our universalist premises (all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and in principle any of them could be or become a U.S. citizen) conflict with reality (there is no practical way the United States can either guarantee those rights to non-citizens abroad or just allow billions of people to immigrate so that they can enjoy that guarantee at home). Now the differences between types of nations is not negligible, but in both principle and practice, all democratic citizenship necessarily involves hard choices about borders, and population, and so on. Refusing to adopt an ethnic identity doesn't change that. To reply more directly to Freddie's argument: the tension between the universal and the particular is inherent in modern democratic political life, and you cannot resolve it by becoming the "right kind" of democracy.

Similarly, there is no essential virtue (or lack thereof) in being a civic or an ethnic nation. Japan was as ethnic nation throughout the 1930s, during which time much of its conduct was frankly terrifying, but it has been no less an ethnic nation since 1945, when it has emerged as peaceable and civilized a country as exists in the world. Conversely, the civic nationalism of the United States has not prevented it from spending more years engaged in war or "military operations" than not for nearly a century. And of course, a great deal of these discussions of the superiority of civic over ethnic nationalism tend to be conducted by...citizens of civic nations. It all reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke: sure, my brain is the most important organ in my body, but look what's telling me that!

Now, it must be said that these labels of "civic" and "ethnic" are ideal types, and in practice things inevitably get messier. Such is life. So the reality of even ethnic peoplehood is rarely binary, but rather exhibits what we might call clinal variation. Italians, for example, are not all one thing (hence tourists enjoy the variety between the Alpine Dolomites and the Mediterranean coasts), but they are also not just anything under the sun (hence Lecce still has more in common with Turin than either do with Hanoi). On top of this, within all kinds of nations, there is a good deal of historical randomness and drift. For example, there is no necessary reason why Houston has the largest population of Nigerians and Washington, DC the largest population of Ethiopians (respectively) in America, but they do.

It is because of this basic messiness in the majority of instances that Israel's situation may appear unique, when in fact it's just more starkly apparent in Israel's case. It's true that relatively few countries have written their ethnic status into their constitutions, and yet we and they possess a certain understanding of countries like Ireland, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, et very much cetera existing for their eponymous peoples.

Now, many countries for situational reasons do not much need to put that national identity to the test, thus the particular character of their nationalism remains more tacit than explicit. It is only with the substantial rise in human migration that began to take place after 1945, that such tests have seriously emerged. Which is not to say that ethnic nationalism cannot accommodate any immigration of outsiders. When it comes to any of this, as the much-maligned Enoch Powell put it, "numbers are of the essence." This point I think is unavoidable. For example, every year the kinds of people who care about such things release their lists of Paris' finest boulangeries, and one now routinely finds bakers of Algerian or Vietnamese descent at or around the top. I think only a raving chauvinist could possibly be upset by this, and the attitude of the average person--and even the average Frenchman--would be to happily frequent any establishment that produced delicious crusty baguettes, regardless of the provenance of its owner.

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