A non-exclusive ethnic group is an ethnic group with a means for people from other ethnic groups to obtain ethnic status within it. Possibly the first such group documented in history was that of the Habiru. Others have included the Jews and the Cossacks, but in modern times sovereign countries, like the United States, may also be proposed as attempts to establish a new ethnic identity. However, political scientists such as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) categorize the United States not as a nation-state, but as a "state-nation," precisely because the agent of cohesion is a general belief about a constitutional and representative form of government rather than commonalities among individuals.
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