Citizenship

• 1. Introduction

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  Citizenship is a form of membership in the political community of a sovereign state, bound up with allegiance to that state. It is a concept so familiar that most people rarely pause to examine it. Yet scholars who do pause find something surprisingly contested: a bundle of rights and duties, a history of exclusion as much as inclusion, and a set of unresolved tensions that no society has fully settled.

  Why does citizenship carry no expiration date in most places, yet has historically been denied to women, people of specific skin colors, and those who were enslaved? How did a status that originated in small Greek city-states come to define membership in empires, modern nations, and even supranational unions? And what does it mean, as moral philosopher Joseph Carens argued in 1987, that citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege? These are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. The Greek Polis

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  Historian Geoffrey Hosking, in his 2005 Modern Scholar lecture course, traced the origins of citizenship in ancient Greece to a very particular fear. He explained that the growth of slavery made Greeks especially conscious of the value of freedom. Any Greek farmer might fall into debt and become a slave at almost any time. When Greeks fought together, they fought to avoid being enslaved. And they arranged their political institutions specifically to remain free men.

  Slavery thus had a paradoxical role: it gave slave-owners enough free time to participate in public life. But that public life was sharply bounded. Citizens in ancient Greek, politēs, derived from polis, meaning city. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners known as metics were excluded from this status. Aristotle expressed what citizenship demanded of those who held it in notably stark terms: to take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god.

  The Athenian politician Solon undertook reforms in the early Athenian state that one view holds made citizenship genuinely functional. In Athens, citizens were both rulers and ruled. Important political and judicial offices rotated among them, and every citizen held the right to speak and vote in the political assembly. This was citizenship built on obligations to the community rather than rights conferred by it. Citizens saw those obligations not as burdens but as sources of honor and respect.

• 3. Rome and the Law

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  Rome took the Greek civic ideal and stretched it across an empire. Romans recognized early that granting citizenship to conquered peoples helped legitimize Roman rule over those areas. In doing so, they transformed citizenship from a status of political agency into something closer to a judicial safeguard.

  Rome carried forward Greek principles: equality under the law, civic participation in government, and the notion that no single citizen should hold too much power for too long. But Rome added something new. If Greek citizenship was described as an emancipation from the world of things, the Roman sense increasingly reflected the capacity to act on material things as well as on other citizens. One historian summarized the shift: the person came to be defined and represented through actions upon things, and over time the term property came to mean first the defining characteristic of a human being, second the relation a person had with a thing, and third the thing defined as the possession of some person.

  Roman citizenship also reflected a continuous struggle between patrician interests and the plebeian working class. A citizen came to be understood as someone free to act by law, free to ask and expect the law's protection, and a member of a specific legal community with a specific standing within it. Citizenship meant having rights to possessions, immunities, and expectations, available in many kinds and degrees. Roman citizenship was more impersonal and multiform than the Greek version, with different degrees and applications depending on status.

• 4. Feudal Subjects, Urban Burghers

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  During the European Middle Ages, citizenship retreated from empires and attached itself to cities and towns. It applied mainly to what one might call middle-class folk. Titles such as burgher, grand burgher, and the bourgeoisie denoted both political affiliation to a particular locality and membership in a mercantile or trading class. Individuals of respectable means and socioeconomic standing were essentially interchangeable with citizens.

  The nobility, meanwhile, held a range of privileges above commoners. That arrangement began to crack with the French Revolution, which abolished those privileges and introduced an egalitarian concept of citizenship. Before the revolutionary liberté, égalité, fraternité was popularized in 1789, the Austria-Hungary dual monarchy had already established imperial citizenship, potentially for all of its subjects, provided that the taxpayer was independent of the local nobility. Legal equality was extended to subjects who were willing to comply with the Habsburg empire's 1811 Civil Code.

  The Renaissance brought a further shift. City dwellers who had fought alongside nobles to defend their cities were no longer content with subordinate status. They demanded a greater role in the form of citizenship. Each city had its own law, courts, and independent administration. Membership in guilds offered an indirect form of citizenship in that it helped members succeed financially. Citizenship became idealized and somewhat abstract, signifying not submission to a lord but rather a bond between a person and a state, carrying rights and duties alike.

• 5. Race and Citizenship in America

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  The Naturalization Act of 1790 was the first law in United States history to establish rules for citizenship and naturalization. Its language was precise: any alien being a free white person, who had resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for two years, might be admitted to citizenship. Everyone who was not of European descent was barred.

  For African Americans, exclusion was further hardened by the Supreme Court. In 1857, the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that a free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution, and that the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply to them. It took the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War to change that. The 14th Amendment, ratified on the 9th of July 1868, stated that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. The Naturalization Act of 1870 then extended naturalization rights to aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent.

  Other groups faced their own exclusions. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly denied naturalization to all people of Chinese origin. Supreme Court cases from 1922 and 1923, Ozawa v. United States and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind respectively, ruled that ethnically Japanese and Indian people were not white persons and therefore ineligible for naturalization. Native Americans waited until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 for full citizenship. Even then, some state laws prevented Native Americans from voting well into the 1960s. In 1962, New Mexico became the last state to enfranchise them. Racial and gender restrictions for naturalization were not explicitly abolished until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and immigration quota systems were not substantially reformed until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

• 6. Ideology in Extremis

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  The Nazi regime in Germany took the logic of exclusionary citizenship to its furthest documented extreme. The state classified inhabitants into three hierarchical categories: citizens, subjects, and aliens. Citizenship was conferred only on males of German or so-called Aryan heritage who had completed military service, and it could be revoked by the state at any time. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 established racial criteria for citizenship in the German Reich, and under it Jews and anyone who could not prove German racial heritage were stripped of their citizenship.

  Subjects were all others born within the nation's boundaries who did not meet those racial criteria. They had no voting rights, could hold no position within the state, and possessed none of the rights and responsibilities extended to citizens. All women were classified as subjects upon birth; a woman could obtain citizen status only by working independently or by marrying a German citizen. Aliens, the third category, were citizens of other states and had no rights in Germany at all.

  In 2021 the German government passed a law entitling victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants to become naturalized German citizens. The 1918 constitution of revolutionary Russia had taken a strikingly different stance. It granted citizenship to any foreigners living in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic so long as they were engaged in work and belonged to the working class. It recognized the equal rights of all citizens irrespective of racial or national connections and declared oppression of any minority group or race to be contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic.

• 7. Beyond the Nation-State

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  The Maastricht Treaty introduced citizenship of the European Union as a formal concept. Article 17(1) of the Treaty on European Union stated that every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union, and that Union citizenship shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship. The amended EC Treaty then established specific rights: Article 12 guaranteed non-discrimination within the scope of the Treaty, Article 18 provided a limited right to free movement and residence in Member States other than a citizen's own, and Articles 18-21 and 225 provided certain political rights.

  Mercosur, the Southern Common Market, approved its own Citizenship Statute in 2010, with the program to be fully implemented by member countries in 2021, at which point it was to become an international treaty incorporated into national legal systems under the concept of the Mercosur Citizen.

  Commonwealth citizenship operates differently still. Since the establishment of the Commonwealth of Nations, citizens of member states hold this secondary status, which in some member countries means visa-free travel, the right to vote in local and national elections, and in some instances the right to stand for election. In the United Kingdom, all Commonwealth citizens legally residing there can vote and stand for office at all elections. Ireland was excluded from the Commonwealth in 1949 after declaring itself a republic, yet it is generally treated as if it were still a member; Irish citizens are not classified as foreign nationals in the United Kingdom.

• 8. The Unresolved Tensions

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  Sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe offered one way to define the underlying logic of citizenship: it is based on the extent to which a person can control their own destiny within a group, in the sense of being able to influence the government of that group. That definition is descriptively useful, but it does not settle the debates.

  Scholars point to what they call the consent-descent distinction as one of the deepest unresolved issues. Is citizenship fundamentally about choosing to belong to a nation, that is, consent? Or is it about where a person happened to be born, that is, descent? Neither modern law nor political theory has given a stable answer. A related tension sits between political citizenship and social citizenship, with ongoing disagreement about the proper balance between the two.

  Moral philosopher Joseph Carens put the critique most sharply in 1987, arguing that citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege, an inherited status that greatly enhances one's life chances. Like feudal birthright privileges, he wrote, restrictive citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely. Today citizenship education is taught in schools across many countries, including as a compulsory subject in state schools in England for all pupils aged 11-16. Whether teaching young people about its mechanics can resolve the deeper philosophical tensions is itself, perhaps, an open question.