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Defining citizenship has preoccupied social scientists for millennia. “It is clear that the first thing that must be sought is the citizen,” wrote Aristotle, “for the city is a certain multitude of citizens. Thus what ought to be called a citizen and what the citizen is must be investigated” (Aristotle, 3:1). Like the polis of Aristotle’s time, a modern state is a collection of citizens, defining citizenship requires investigation, and it is not always easy to determine what or who ought to be called a citizen. According to more recent commentary, there is “no notion more central in politics than citizenship, and none more variable in history, or contested in theory” (Shklar, 1).
Definition
In its most fundamental sense, citizenship refers to membership within a political community. Today, this membership is most often expressed as a relationship between an individual and a sovereign state; for example, an individual can be a citizen of Canada or Brazil, but not a citizen within a company or private organization. Symbols such as a passport, or other identification documents issued by relevant state authorities, often represent citizenship as a for m of state membership. Most people acquire citizenship in a particular state, at birth through the operation of nationality law. This means individuals are either commonly granted the nationality of the state in which they are born or granted citizenship based upon their father or mother’s nationality. In the instance of individuals who do not acquire citizenship of the state in which they were physically born, such as immigrants, these persons may eventually acquire this state’s citizenship through a process of naturalization, in which they are often required to have spent a minimum time period in the state, take an oath of allegiance, and potentially renounce a previously held foreign citizenship through denaturalization. Thus, the term citizenship, by these definitions, is a legal relationship between an individual and a political community (i.e., a state).
A related meaning of citizenship, going beyond the strictly legal relationship between an individual and a sovereign state, refers to the rights and duties that accompany a person’s membership in a political community. This second meaning focuses on the political obligations of the citizen, since it refers to the individual not only obeying the state’s law but also participating in the political process. For Aristotle, citizenship meant not only being ruled but also sharing in the ruling—a notion denouncing the proponents of absolute monarchy. For centuries, there have been debates about the distinction between citizens and subjects. Today the term citizenship is generally accepted in this political sense as restricted to individuals who are citizens of democratic regimes, in which they are considered to be active participants in their own state’s political process. Essentially, while a person may be a legal citizen in a nondemocratic state retaining the proper passport proclaiming such legal citizenship, these citizens do not typically have the degree of influence or powers to exact political change within their states as practiced in democracies.
Theoretical work on defining citizenship is varied and voluminous; however, many authors distinguish between two strands captured under the terms republican, which is occasionally conflated with communitarian, and liberal. The republican concept of citizenship embraces Aristotle’s views on political participation and civic self-rule. Italian Renaissance political philosopher Niccoló Machiavelli’s description of Italian city-states encouraging national unity and open political engagement and debate, as well as 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s advocacy of the public’s collective will to provide for the common good, also fall under the republican concept. By contrast, the liberal view of citizenship emphasizes an individual’s adherence to the state’s rule of law and the individual’s liberty from state interference, thus a status rather than an activity.
Both versions are subject to the criticism that the distinction between public and private citizenship is artificial. They also fall prey to a multicultural critique that promotes differential rights for immigrants, minorities, or constituent nations; the possibility of group rights inherent in aboriginal self-government also arises. Such critiques question the extent to which citizenship, albeit a unitary status or a shared engagement, can operate within pluralist societies in which there is no singular entity with the ability to solely dictate the political or socioeconomic climate.
The Rise Of Citizenship
Determining Citizenship
Prior to any discussion of the rights that citizenship entails, it is common to discuss and determine the attribution of citizenship, and in particular the question of who has the power to grant or take away one’s citizenship. Since the development of modern citizenship has been intimately connected with the development of sovereignty, the traditional view attributed citizenship to flow solely from state author ity. In this vein, the 1930 Hague Convention specified that it “is for each State to determine under its own law who are its nationals.”
However, during the next fifteen years, millions of individuals, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, were stripped of their citizenship as consequence of World War II (1939–1945). Due to the postwar large-scale European denaturalizations, the United Nations agreed, in the aftermath of the war, to limit sovereignty by specifying, in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone is entitled to a citizenship and citizens cannot be arbitrarily deprived of their citizenship or denied the right to change it. Within such broad parameters of international law, however, individual state policies on the attribution of citizenship continue to differ substantially. All states employ some combination of jus sanguinis (attribution on the basis of descent) and jus soli (attribution on the basis of place of birth), but some are more restrictive while others more liberal. States frequently revise their laws and policies concerning such issues as dual nationality, immigration, and naturalization, all of which help determine who can acquire citizenship and who cannot.
Alongside varying policies on citizenship itself, the individual rights that comprise citizenship also change as state policies change. Thus, the meaning of the social rights tied to citizenship shifted in many states during the 1980s, away from concrete redistributive entitlements toward a simple emphasis on social inclusion and equal opportunity. Such changes altered the long-held perception that a state’s duty was to provide basic economic entitlements to its citizens. Additionally, if shared citizenship implies an obligation to redistribute resources to fellow citizens, then the term citizenship is continuously transformed as the nature of welfare entitlements evolves.
Examining The Rights Of Citizens
The rising interest in citizenship may be attributed to the term’s common association with guaranteed rights and justices within a political community. T. H. Marshall’s influential post–World War II definition of citizenship describes its development in terms of three distinct phases, with each phase characterized by individuals acquiring certain rights from the state. In this definition, civil rights (e.g., equality before the law, the right to own property and sign binding contracts, freedom of religion and of speech) led to an individual’s political rights (e.g., the right to vote and run for office), which in turn led to social rights guaranteeing the right to a minimal level of social and economic welfare. Tension between the growth of individual entitlement, known as rights, and the demands of membership within particular communities, namely communal duties or shared obligations, often characterize contemporary democracies.
Authors focusing on the rise of globalization during the late 20th century complicate Marshall’s model arguing that, due to the significant increases in foreign travel and immigration, the international human rights regime, rather than states, now guarantees civil rights to persons worldwide, and furthermore, many states grant social rights to individuals on the basis of residence rather than citizenship. Thus, some states appear to be extending civil and social rights to individuals within their community, regardless if they possess the political rights associated with citizenship.
However, contemporary developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have, at times, contradicted this post national thesis, at least in terms of social rights, as some states have restricted social rights to noncitizens and legal citizens—possibly as a means to limit transnational migration or reduce state expenditure and costs. Some states have excluded noncitizens from automatic access to education, nonemergency health care, or social benefit funding. Since the midtwentieth and into the twenty-first century, certain states within the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa are significantly and frequently affected by cross-border refugee flows and internally displaced persons seeking to evade ongoing armed conflicts, ethnic violence, and insurgencies devastating their home states. Rising global refugee rates challenge host governments to abide by international standards but limit natural citizen rights. This challenge is heightened in many developing nations that cannot accommodate incoming immigrants or refugees with social rights, especially since most developing countries continue to struggle with supplying the basic, social, and political rights for their own legal citizen population.
Conversely, even legal citizens have lost some of their perceived or promised rights associated with their state’s definition of citizenship or the international community’s list of unalienable rights. Many state governments have privatized major institutions, adopting market fundamentalism, or an absolute reliance on a free market economy; this can interfere with a citizen’s promise of equal and effective rights, as many persons cannot financially compete with private sector costs for health care or education. As such, while basic civil rights may still be protected for individuals, it appears more common for citizens of a wealthy or powerful state to fare better in retaining their social rights than those citizens residing in a poor or weak state. Indeed, citizenship of a wealthy and powerful state can be viewed as a valuable commodity.
Common to both Marshall’s definition of citizenship and its post national critiques is the premise that citizenship is a collection of rights. By these interpretations, citizenship is undeniably being challenged by the unbundling of rights accelerated by the processes of globalization. Individuals can increasingly choose services from different governments or pursue alternatives, rather than be constrained to accept government dictates in the regions where they have citizenship or reside. In the end, the tension between the universalist claims of human rights and the particularism of local identities and affiliations may be irreconcilable: The operation of every political community, short of a global one, involves processes of inclusion but also of exclusion.
Different Trajectories Of Citizenship
In terms of citizen attribution rules and the rights associated with citizenship, the historical trajectories of citizenship among different states demonstrate significant variances. Such variation reflects the differences in historical processes of state and nation-building and the rise and transformation of sovereignty.
Case Study: U.S. Citizenship
In the United States, citizenship evolved in response to a range of factors, including efforts to restrict rights on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender. Americans “long struggled over whether state or national citizenship is or should be primary. Many thought that question was settled by the Civil War or the New Deal, but it has resurfaced in recent political and legal debates” (Smith, 1997, 5). The early United States was far from a homogeneous body of citizens, and the states controlled citizenship until the Naturalization Acts of 1792 and 1795 established federal control. Even then, American citizenship meant a “double allegiance” to both state and nation. The naturalization acts made naturalization a federal responsibility, but the states continued to control voting rights and the extent of religious and racial discrimination. In some states, women and poor men could vote; in others, they could not. Some states permitted slavery, while others did not. Thomas Jefferson’s claim that the U.S. Constitution established a “compact of independent nations” may be exaggerated, but it correctly described the differences in citizenship equality.
The U.S. Articles of Confederation established an underdeveloped central government, without a mechanism for enforcing its laws or collecting taxes, dependent on voluntary compliance by the states. The Constitution created a system of shared sovereignty between the federal government and the states, with the powers of the central government limited to those enumerated in the constitution and the states retaining sovereignty in all other areas. Over time, the federal government’s authority grew primarily through expansive interpretations of the interstate commerce clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, which was a direct reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857.The decision helped spark the American Civil War (1861–1865) by ruling that African Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. ”The Dred Scott ruling continued, “we must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States.” The decision was thus a decisive ruling against common national citizenship.
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War, in 1868, to guarantee all individual’s born or naturalized in the United States with rights in all states, particularly the states in which slavery had just been abolished that were least likely to accept slaves as U.S. citizens. Though the amendment privileged national citizenship over state citizenship, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and related rulings limited the amendment’s impact. As the federal government abdicated its responsibility to protect rights, the Fourteenth Amendment’s implementation and oversight reverted to the individual states. Racial policy, in particular, continued to be determined by separate states rather than the federal government. It was not until the 1920s that the Supreme Court reversed its restrictive doctrine and extended the range of citizenship rights for a wide range of civil rights and liberties—extensions prompted by social struggles for inclusion in the right to vote and right to employment.
Presently, citizenship questions and struggles for specific rights remain throughout the United States. Many social movements, including those pushing for equality on the basis of sexual orientation, continue to frame demands referencing the laws and definitions surrounding the term citizenship. Other inconsistencies include Puerto Rico since most Puerto Rican residents are U.S. citizens, but do not have full political rights, and nor do residents of Washington D.C. or several other U.S. territories. Comparable anomalies exist worldwide, highlighting the difficult nature of citizenship as a reflection of sovereignty. At the same time, the United States, like other federations, faces continuing tension between the ideal of equal citizenship and the reality of differential rights and privileges (e.g., lower tuition fees for local residents, or waiting times for access to health care or other benefits for citizens moving from another jurisdiction) accruing to members of its constituent jurisdictions.
Case Study: Eu Citizenship
The most dramatic development in the evolution of citizenship in postwar Europe has been the creation and growth of supranational rights captured under the concept of European Union (EU) citizenship. Citizens of EU’s twenty-seven member states now hold EU citizenship as well as their own member state’s national citizenship. Member states may no longer discriminate between their own citizens and those of other EU member states, who have acquired wide-ranging civic, political, and social rights throughout the territory of the European Union. Though treaties specify EU citizenship will not replace national citizenship, the European Court of Justice, in a series of judgments, has ruled, “Union citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of Member States.”
In contrast to U.S. citizenship, or indeed the citizenship of most contemporary states, the rise of EU citizenship is far more recent, motivated by economic integration coupled with a commitment to building a supranational political community. Proponents of further European integration actively promote the concept of an EU citizenship that supersedes member state nationality. Whereas member state citizenship remains primary in the European Union, in federal states such as the United States, state or provincial citizenship long ago ceased to dominate. The meaning of citizenship is far from uniform across Europe, however. Within national contexts, various views of citizenship and political community were important in developing the specific forms that national citizenship takes when it is translated into policies and institutions. Citizenship rights in most states generally evolved through a long process of political contestation between governments and citizens. Yet the rights that now comprise Union citizenship were simply introduced by treaties and bargaining among governments.
There are parallels between the rise of EU citizenship and the growth, in the nineteenth century, of a national layer of citizenship over existing municipal or regional versions. Before the French Revolution (1789–1799), which promoted the notion of popular sovereignty and spurred the creation of national citizenry, many of the rights characterizing today’s citizens were provided by local municipalities; these included the rights of residence and employment, civil rights such as trial in local courts, and rights to participate in the political process. Notably, in German, the word for citizenship, Bürgerschaft, is the same term used to identify the parliaments of German cities, Bremen and Hamburg. Many municipalities even provided social rights. Establishing a “thin” EU citizenship over those same nation-state citizenships echoes the initially “thin” layer of nation-state citizenship rights over the existing structure of preexisting “thick” municipal citizenships. This parallels the development of federal citizenship in the United States.
Reconsidering The Meaning Of Citizenship
Defining who has the right to have rights is a necessary first step for any political community. Rights need not be restricted to citizens; for example, every person enjoys human rights regardless of citizenship status, and in many states individuals enjoy rights even if they are not citizens. Nevertheless, full rights are restricted to citizens who, in a democracy, are the only ones authorized to change their rights.
The historical variability and theoretical contestation over citizenship has led to the concept being stretched far beyond its strict legal meaning, and even its broader political definition. Describing an emerging view of citizenship as relational, cultural, historical, and continent on socially constructed categories such as gender, race, or nationality, Charles Tilly defines citizenship as a continuing series of transactions between persons and agents of a state. Rights and obligations are enforceable uniquely by virtue of the person’s membership in an exclusive category (the native born plus the naturalized) and the agent’s relation to the state rather than any other authority. Meanwhile the journal, Citizenship Studies, states in its aims the desire to “move beyond conventional notions of citizenship, and treat citizenship as a strategic concept that is central in the analysis of identity, participation, empowerment, human rights and the public interest.”
When conventional accounts of citizenship developed, it appeared relatively easy to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and hence between candidates for citizenship and foreigners. Migrations were assumed to be permanent as immigrants moved to their destination country, became naturalized citizens, and broke ties with their country of origin. Increasingly, however, previously territorially fixed groups and individuals have gained access to various forms of mobility. In addition to the borderless movements of capital, goods, and ideas, people too move around to a much greater extent and with greater ease than was generally true in the past. Large groups of expatriate communities have been established, and members participate in the politics of their country of residence while at the same time sustaining connections to their country of origin. Such individuals maintain ties with more than one political community, and in many cases have access to dual citizenship, with full legal recognition as members of more than one political community.
In a world in which transnational moral and political obligations gain in importance and individuals claim membership and participate in multiple political communities, the view that territorially bounded sovereign states are the only source of civil society may become untenable. By its very nature, migration upsets the balance between insiders and outsiders, as newcomers seek to enter the political community. Despite universal or cosmopolitan hopes for a global citizenship, presently, achieving the legal status of citizen of the state remains important for immigrants, because only then do they enjoy full access to rights. More broadly, despite aspirations on the part of some for nation-states to wither away, it appears likely that for the foreseeable future the nation-state will remain the primary locus of citizenship.
Bibliography:
- The Politics, translated by C. Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
- Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Elkins, David J. Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-first Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1995.
- Jacobson, David. Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
- Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978.
- Kymlicka, Will, and Wayne Norman. “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory.” Ethics 104 (1994): 352–381.
- Maas, Willem. Creating European Citizens. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
- Marshall, T. H. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950.
- Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
- Somers, Margaret R. Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Soysal,Yasemin Nuhoglu. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994.
- Tilly, Charles. 1995. “Citizenship, Identity, and Social History.” International Review of Social History 40, no. 3 (1995): 1–17.
- van Gunsteren, Herman. A Theory of Citizenship: Organizing Plurality in Contemporary Democracies. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.
See also:
- How to Write a Political Science Essay
- Political Science Essay Topics
- Political Science Essay Examples
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