[namaria]

Ethnic states are a things, albeit quite debatable since ethnicity is an entirely contingent and subjective construct. Monoethnic states are the dream of genocides, not ever a reality on the ground (doesn't matter how you define ethnicity).

[anovikov]

Well where in a state there's no word in a language to differentiate between a citizen and someone of a title ethnicity, i can call it an ethnostate. Say Armenian or Polish: there's no 2nd word in their languages for that. Because there are so few citizens who aren't of title ethnicity, and they are so marginalised and subject to such a quick assimilation, there isn't even a need to bother inventing a word.

If there is such a word say, "Kazakh" vs "Kazakhstani" or "Russkiye" vs "Rossiyane", existence of such a word shows that this state is an empire.

Sometimes the "ethnic" word simply doesn't exist, say in "Canadian" or "American" for U.S.: it's only citizenship, there's no ethnicity at all - neither the word nor substance - showing a "melting pot" country.

[namaria]

You're resting an awful lot of political and sociological thinking on a very superficial bit of very arbitrary linguistics.

I mean, concluding that Kazakhstan is an empire while the US is not pretty much discredits the whole thing.

[anovikov]

That's as simple as having vs not having a title ethnicity in the country. If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another: it's a melting pot. Kazakhstan in particular, in any case, is moving towards an ethnic state, as every other ethnicity except Kazakh has very low birth rate there so in a few generations it will become homogenous.

[namaria]

> If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another

That's a wild, unwarranted and patently wrong statement.