Is the European fear of China reasonable? Is Europe really faced to the new threat or is faced to its own fail? This paper is focused on some of the most relevant issues present in this discourse - dichotomy between European idealism and Chinese pragmatism, European socialism and Chinese capitalism, and European protectionism and Chinese syncretism.
The paper examines theoretical discourses of ethnicity and has three main objectives: (1) to categorize and compare three academic approaches to-wards ethnicity, nation and nationalism, (2) to identify the core distinction between ethnic and national identity, and (3) to analyze the differences between approaches through activity and objectivity of ethnicity. The traditional distinction between primordialist and modernist/situationist approaches is enhanced by adding the ethicist approach to the interjacent boundary. There are three core lines of distinctions between these approaches. Firstly, it is, more or less, the dis-tinction between primordiality of ethnicity and modernity of nation, not primordiality and modernity itself, which divides the discussed approaches. Secondly, most academic theories, regardless of their background, interpret the ethnicity (nation) as situational rather than objective or subjective phenomenon. Lastly, it is the scale of activity of ethnicity (activity of individuals - components - systems) which differs among the theories.