Derek Heater - What is Citizenship

The title of citizen (citoyen, citoyenne) was adopted by the French revolutionaries to pronounce the symbolic reality of equality: the titles of aristocratic distinction were expunged. The Russian revolutionaries went one better by replacing even the title of Mr (gospodin) by the uniform title of citizen (grazhdanin). Today citizenship is a commonly held status throughout the world, though, true, the title has not persisted; so equality, at least in theory, in principle and in law, might seem pervasive. But explaining that equality how it has evolved; its variegated elements, including rights and duties; the civic identity it provides; and how far the practice so often falls short of the theory all this is a much more complicated business than the bland statement of the generalized principle of equality might suggest.

Yet, however difficult the concept of citizenship may be, the effort of comprehension is especially necessary now. For we are at present living through an age that for good reasons considers citizenship of cardinal significance. However, as a consequence of this recognized importance, academic enquiry has uncovered the extraordinary complexity of its history and present condition to aid our more accurate understanding.

There have been other ages of heightened consciousness of citizenship, often associated with particular states. Fifth to fourth-century BC Athens, first-century BC to first-century AD Rome, late medieval Florence, late eighteenth-century America and France spring obviously to mind. The present interest is different: it is virtually global in its extent. How, then, to explain the fascination the subject currently holds? It

derives from the confluence of a number of events and concerns in the 1980s and 1990s.

First, in the established liberal democracies the emergence to political and doctrinal dominance of the New Right in the US and UK threw into question the validity of social citizenship. By social citizenship is meant the provision of welfare state benefits as a right. It is a right that was conceded in order to ensure a greater equality for citizens than would be the case if untempered market forces of employment and wages were allowed to prevail.

Secondly, partly because of accelerated human migrations and partly because of enhanced and politicized awareness of ethnic differences within states, the fact that almost all states are multicultural in demographic composition has become an issue related to the definition of citizenship as civic identity.

Thirdly, and closely related to this development, ethnic, cultural and national consciousness have brought about either the loosening or the actual fragmentation of polities hitherto thought of as nation-states. What does it mean, for example, to be a Canadian citizen if one thinks of oneself primarily as a Qubcois, or an Israeli citizen, if a Palestinian Arab? In potentially fissiparous conditions like these only a stable or strong government could hold a national citizenship in place. In the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that stability and strength failed; and the assumed nation-states disintegrated. Furthermore, it was a consciousness among a critical mass of the population of the need and the opportunity to claim an effective citizenship that wrought these changes.

But, and moreover, these states had been autocratic regimes, many of whose successor governments sought to rebuild their political systems, this time following the liberal democratic blueprint. And so, fourthly, they have needed to construct fresh constitutions and ways of conducting public life which could give reality to the legal and political rights of citizenship that had not been thoroughly enjoyed under Communism. Nor were the ex-Communist countries alone in striving to make this transition: South Africa and the states of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America that had endured but shook themselves loose from military dictatorships, have passed through similar experiences of improving the meaning of citizenship for their people.

Fifthly, we are becoming increasingly conscious that for large numbers of people throughout the world the idea of citizenship is still hollow and meaningless, deprived as they are of virtually all its attributes.