Citizenship is different not only to other types of political affiliation, such as subjecthood in monarchies or dictatorships, but also to other kinds of social relationship, such as being a parent, a friend, a partner, a neighbor, a colleague, or a customer.
The city states of ancient Greece, which first gave rise to the notion of citizenship, were quite different to the ancient Roman republic or the city states of Renaissance Italy, and all differed tremendously from the nation states that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and that still provide the primary context for citizenship today.
Citizenship has traditionally referred to a particular set of political practices involving specific public rights and duties with respect to a given political community. Broadening its meaning to encompass human relations generally detracts from the importance of the distinctively political tasks citizens perform to shape and sustain the collective life of the community. Without doubt, the commonest and most crucial of these tasks is involvement in the democratic process — primarily by voting, but also by speaking out, campaigning in various ways, and standing for office. Whether citizens participate or not, the fact that they can do so colors how they regard their other responsibilities, such as abiding to those democratically passed laws they disagree with, paying taxes, doing military service, and so on. It also provides the most effective mechanism for them to promote their collective interests and encourage their political rulers to pursue the public’s good rather than their own.
Rules and regulations cannot cover everything, and their being followed cannot depend on coercion alone. If people acted in a socially responsible way only because they feared being punished otherwise, it would be necessary to create a police state of totalitarian scope to preserve social order — a remedy potentially far worse than the disorder it would seek to prevent.
Imagine if there was no highway code or traffic regulations and we had to coordinate with other drivers simply on the basis of us all possessing good judgment and behaving civilly and responsibly towards each other. Political regulation, say by installing traffic lights, in this and similar cases coordinates our interactions in ways that allow us to know where we stand with regard to others. In areas such as commerce, for example, that means we can enter into agreements and plan ahead with a degree of confidence.
As a result, most people may in fact support very few policies that enjoy outright majority support — they will mainly be in different minorities alongside partly overlapping but often distinct groups of people. If a party wants to build a working majority, therefore, it will have to construct a coalition of minorities across a broad spectrum of issues and policies and arrange trade-offs between them.
People lack self-respect, and possibly respect for others too, in a regime under which they do not have the possibility of expressing their views and being counted, no matter who benevolently and efficiently it is run. Rulers need no longer see the ruled as equals, as entitled to give an opinion and have their interests considered on the same terms as everyone else. And so they need not take them into account.
Calling the citizenship the “right to have rights” indicates how access to numerous rights depends on membership of a political community. However, many human rights activists have criticized the exclusive character of citizenship for this very reason, maintaining that rights ought to be available to all on an equal basis regardless of where you are born or happen to live. As a result, they have sometimes argued against any limits on access to citizenship.
So membership, rights, and participation go together. It is through being a member of a political community and participating on equal terms in the framing of its collective life that we enjoy rights to pursue our individual lives on fair terms with others.
Citizenship is a condition of civic equality. It consists of membership of a political community where all citizens can determine the terms of social cooperation on an equal basis. This status not only secures equal rights to the enjoyment of the collective goods provided by the political association but also involves equal duties to promote and sustain them — including the good of democratic citizenship itself.
Moreover, once in place, these policies will only operate if we continue to cooperate to maintain them through paying taxes and respecting the rights of others that follow from them. So rights involve duties — not least the duty to exercise the political rights to participate on which all our other rights depend. This paradox gives rise in its turn to a dilemma that can affect much cooperative behavior. Namely, that we will be tempted to shirk our civic duties if we feel that we can enjoy the collective goods and the rights they provide by relying on others to do their bit rather than exerting ourselves. And the more citizens act in this way, the less they will trust their fellow citizens to collaborate with them. Collective arrangements will seem increasingly unreliable, prompting people to abandon citizenship for other, more individualistic, ways of securing their interests.
You will gain from living in a democracy whether you vote or not, while any individual vote contributes very little to sustaining democratic institutions. And the shortcoming of democracy — the policies and politicians people dislike — tend to be more evident than its virtues, which are diffuse, and in newly democratized countries, often long term. As a result, the temptation to free-ride is great.
In fact, political scientists used to be puzzled why citizens bothered to vote at all — it seemed irrational. As an individual, it still pays the free-rider to rely on the efforts of others.
Like voting, the cost of the tax I pay to support the police, roads, schools, and hospitals will seem somehow more direct and personal than the benefits I derive from these goods, and a mere drop in the ocean compared to the billions needed to pay for them. Like democracy, these goods also tend to be available to all citizens regardless of how much they pay, or, indeed, whether they have paid at all.
Meanwhile, disillusion about politics has grown. Citizens have increasingly felt politicians will do anything for their vote and once in power employ it selfishly and ineptly. While the better educated and wealthier sections of society have pushed governments and politicians to do less and less, the poorer sections, who find it harder to organize in any case, have increasingly withdraw from politics altogether.
Globalization has been widely perceived as further promoting both these sources of political disaffection. That many public goods, from security against crime to monetary stability, can only be obtained through international mechanisms has added to civic disaffection and the belief in the shortcomings of political measures. International organizations are inevitably much more distant from the citizens they serve. Size matters, and it is much harder to feel solidarity with very large and highly diverse groups with whom one has few, if any, shared cultural or other references and hardly any direct interaction. As a result, short-term individualized behavior is much more likely. Put simply, cheating on strangers is easier than with people you meet every day and will continue to interact with into the foreseeable future.
Despite having elections and a parliament, European politicians are both little trusted and scarcely known, while electoral turnout is far below that for national elections of the member states and likewise on the decline. By and large, citizens have remained tied to their national or subnational allegiances and mainly, and increasingly, view the EU in narrowly self-interested terms as either beneficial or not to their country or economic group.
Aristotle regarded human beings as “political animals” because it is in our nature to live in political communities — indeed, he contended, only within a polis, or city state, could human potential be fully realized. However, people played the roles appropriate to what Aristotle believed was their natural station in life, with only some qualifying as polites, or citizens. Though neither the qualifications Aristotle deemed appropriate for membership of this select group nor the duties he expected of them are regarded as entirely suitable today, they have cast a long shadow over the history of citizenship and their fundamental rationale still underlies much contemporary thinking.
Citizenship was enjoyed by a minority, though a substantial one. Yet, this was inevitable given the high expectations of citizens. For their capacity to perform their not inconsiderable citizenly duties rested on their everyday needs being looked after by the majority of the population, particularly women and slaves.
Meanwhile, many citizens could not avoid also holding public office at some period. With the exception of generals, who were elected by the Assembly and could serve multiple terms for as long as they were successful, public offices were chosen by lot and usually held for one or a maximum of two years.
Aristotle acknowledged that such forms of citizenship were likely to be possible only in fairly small states. That was important not just so everyone could have a turn at ruling and keep the tasks of government sufficiently simple as to be manageable without a professional bureaucracy or political class, but also because it was only in small settings that the requisite civic duties were likely to be fostered.
Unsurprisingly, Greek citizenship has appeared to many later thinkers as the epitome of a true condition of political equality, in which citizens have equal political powers and so must treat each other with equal concern and respect. They have viewed the trend towards delegating political tasks to a professional class of politicians and public administrators with foreboding, as presaging a loss of political freedom and equality, and lamented the — in their opinion — short-sighted tendency for ever more citizens to desert public service to pursue personal concerns.
In reality, it was doubly oppressive. On the one hand, it rested on the oppression of slaves, women, and other non-citizens. On the other hand, it was oppressive of citizens in demanding they sacrifice their private interests to the service of the sate. The two forms of oppression were linked: citizens could only dedicate themselves to public life because their private lives were serviced by others. Both have also been the mark of totalitarian regimes.
In Machiavelli’s eyes, the true lesson of the Roman experience was that the selfish interests of the aristocracy and the people could only be restrained if each could counter the other. The republic institutionalized such mutual restraint by ensuring no person or institution could exercise power except in combination with at least one other person or institution, so both could check and balance each other.
Underlying this account was a distinctively realist view of citizenship, which would be more easily adaptable to modern democratic politics than the Greek view. Instead of viewing the private interest and the public interest as diametrically opposed, so that all elements of the first had to be removed from politics, the public interest emerged from the clash and balancing of private interests.
According to the Aristotelian ideal, political citizenship had depended on being freed from the burdens of economic and social life — both in order to participate and to ensure that public rather than private interests were the object of concern. By contrast, legal citizenship has private interests and their protection at its heart.
The disagreements among theorists mirror those between citizens and return us once more to the dilemma that the source of the rule of law will always lie within the rule of persons. That is, that what the rule of law is thought to mean and how that law is interpreted and applied always lies with people.
Whereas the republican tradition tends to see liberty as the product of laws that citizens have participated in creating for themselves, liberalism has tended to view law as a necessity evil that should seek to preserve as much of the natural liberty of individuals as is compatible with social life.
Lying midway between a city state and an empire, the nation state emerged as their most viable alternative — able to combine certain key advantages while avoiding their disadvantage. If the polis was too small to survive the military encroachments of empires, the empire was too large to allow for meaningful political participation.
The first, state-building, phase consisted of administrative, military, and cultural unification at the elite level, accompanied by territorial consolidation and the creation of an elementary, state-wide bureaucratic and legal infrastructure. This phase created a sovereign political body possessing authority over all activities within a given territorial sphere, with those people residing within it becoming its legitimate subjects. The second phase saw the emergence of commercial and industrial economies. This process led to the creation of the infrastructural public goods required by market economies, such as a unified transport system, a standardized system of weights and measure and a single currency, and the establishment of a regular and unitary legal system. Markets also gradually broke down traditional social hierarchies and systems of ascribed status, fostering freedom of contract and equality before the law — particularly with regard to civil and economic rights. The third, nation-making, phase involved the socialization of the masses into a national consciousness suited to a market and industrial economy by means of compulsory education, linguistic standardization, a popular press, and conscript armies.
The net effect of these processes was to create a “people,” who were entitled to be treated as equals before the law and possessed equal rights to buy and sell goods, services, and labor; whose interests were overseen by a sovereign political authority; and who shared a national identity that shaped their allegiance to each other and to their state. All three elements became important for democratic citizenship. The first provide the basis for regarding all persons as entitled to the equal protection of the laws. The second created a community of interest. The third let citizens to consider themselves as a people, sharing certain common values and various special obligations towards one another.
The need for mass conscript armies during WW1 and WW2, and, in consequence, for women’s labor to run the domestic economy, aided considerably the acquisition of political and social rights by men and women in many European countries in this period. Yet, in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland which remained outside these conflicts, these pressures were absent. As a result, in these countries changes to women’s status came by a different and much slower route.
International organizations such as the WB, the WTO, and the IMF regulate a great deal of international trade, but citizens can control them only very indirectly through their governments. Moreover, such bodies as subject to international law and courts which have very little political accountability at all.
Much like exclusive golf clubs, states have typically justified their exclusions on the grounds that prospective members must be able to contribute in appropriate ways and “fit in” with existing members and the prevailing ethos.
The necessity and unavoidability of living in a state makes the exclusivity associated with citizenship doubly problematic. First, it seems invidious to exclude those who are subject to a given state’s power from full membership, possessing the same rights as other citizens. Second, given that the state you initially find yourself in is an accident of birth, it may seem equally invidious to hinder people moving to become members of a different state that offers them better opportunities, if they are willing to take on the duties as well as enjoy the rights of citizenship.
The house was the basic component of the economy — indeed, the term “economy” derives from the Greek words for household and rules. To be a householder signified being economically self-sufficient, with one’s material needs taken care of by a range of domestic servants, not least one’s wife as an unpaid household manager.
Three features of this condition were deemed important for politics. First, it meant that citizens could devote themselves to their civic duties, being freed from the need to earn a livelihood. Second, they were not only freed from a dependency on things but also from being the dependants of other people. Indeed, they owned others. They were independent — able to act and think as they believed best rather than as those on whom they depended for their living directed. Finally, it meant they literally had a stake in the political community, with their fate — or at least their assets — intimately bound to its fate, to the extent of being willing to fight and possibly die for their country.
In line with the thinking that private wealth was a prerequisite for disinterested public service, it was generally thought inappropriate to pay politicians salaries well into the 19th century.
Meanwhile, it effectively debarred those without private wealth from public office. Gradually, thinking on this score changed to quite the opposite — that a public salary was the best means for freeing politicians from their private obligations. Likewise, making politics a profession gave politicians an incentive to develop their political skills and live “for” politics, achieving success by showing they could lead and act for the public interest.
This development also had implications for the demands placed on citizens. Citizens remain eligible as potential rulers in being able to put themselves forward as candidates for office. But public service is no longer expected of the vast majority of citizens. Instead, the main task for citizens is to select rulers.
True, there have been arguments that those who draw welfare should be barred from voting because their private interest is closely allied to increasing public spending to which they do not contribute, though in fact this group is among the least likely to vote and has the least influence in society generally. Yet, many have argued that the public interest simply is the aggregate interests of the citizens. There is a real danger that unless those subject to government are allowed to express their interests politically then they will be overlooked.
A central feature of the intensifying of the division of labor allowed by the emerging market society, of which the professionalization of politics was but one example, was that we all became dependent on each other. A “free man” could no longer be someone who was self-sufficient, the master of an autonomous economic system represented by the household. As civic republican theorists had always feared, a desire for luxury goods destroyed such independence even for those with considerable wealth.
Yet, the universality of mutual dependence also had a certain leveling effect. None of these others are our personal dependants.
Freedom of contract also had important practical consequences, eventually allowing workers to organize and use their bargaining power to equalize first the terms and conditions of their employment and then their legal standing in other areas too, including politics. The key became to ensure all citizens could make decisions for themselves rather than having to defer to another’s opinion because they depended on them entirely for their livelihood and information.
And the most tangible sign of such “a permanent fixed interest” was ownership of part of its territory — in other words, landed property.
However, if property is a poor guide to whether a citizen’s interests are tied to those of the political community, some sign of long-term commitment does seem appropriate. After all, citizens not only derive benefits from the state but also can influence its future shape through the decision they make. Many states therefore made a significant period of continuous residence a criterion for full citizenship.
When the American colonists declared independence, they did so in large part on the basis of the slogan that there should be “no taxation without representation.” But it was long thought that the reverse should equally hold true — that those who did not pay taxes ought not to be represented. Otherwise, they would have no motive to encourage governments to pursue cost-effective policies.
For a long time the most tangible sign of a willingness to align one’s interests with the state and do one’s bit to uphold it was military service. Moreover, republican theorists worried if rulers could use mercenaries or create a professional army, then they would be able to dominate the ruled. A citizen’s army was a necessary complement to democracy to keep rulers in check.
The introduction of universal male suffrage and the conscription of all fit adult males more or less went hand in hand. Requiring the ultimate sacrifice without granting some say over when it might be demanded and what one was fighting for became untenable, particularly in light of the mass slaughter of WW1.
Change will only come with sustained and concerted public effort, and even then will be painfully slow.
Historically, women have been viewed as unsuited to citizenship on the grounds that they are too emotional — ruled by their passions rather than reason, and liable to be partial to those for whom they feel particular attachments rather than acting impartially. The claim of some feminists is that reason, impartiality, and universalism are indeed masculine ways of thinking, and that women take a more “caring” approach centred on affection and feeling for particular others.
Democracy assumes a people, or demos, who feel sufficient solidarity with each other to accept collective decisions and enough mutual trust to cooperate. Without solidarity, individuals would be tempted to obey only those collective decisions that benefited them and even then might be inclined to free-ride. Majorities may be unwilling to accommodate minorities, minorities to accept majority decisions. Without trust, the fear will be that nobody will play their part — that, for example, if an incumbent government concedes defeat in an election their successors will prevent their ever winning again, thereby justifying their rigging or halting the electoral process themselves to stay in power. Welfare similarly depends on the “haves” showing solidarity towards the “have-nots” and trust in the former doing their best to improve the conditions of the latter and, if successful, to shoulder a part of the burden in their turn. Finally, making collective decisions assumes common institutions, customs, and discourses that all involved agree are legitimate and can employ.
It is estimated that there are between 5K and 9K ethnic-cultural groups in the world, and only around 200 states, over 90% of which contain more than one ethnic group.
Size matters, and the larger the scale on which democracy works, the less influence citizens will have and the more disempowered they are likely to feel. Many citizens of the larger democracies expressed such feelings already, but in any type of world democracy representatives would need to be responsible for millions rather than thousands of voters.
Whom are we opposed to? What is the outcome they desire? How is this different from our desired outcome?
Remember always that threats are expensive when they fail and bribes are expensive when they succeed.
Meanwhile, the existence of alternative regimes also puts pressure on despotic states in particular to improve their ways — not least because they offer a possible place of escape for opponents and others. A world state gets rid of such alternatives, it risks being “a universal despotism.”
We seem faced with a conundrum. Justice appears to demand linking citizenship to rights within some form of cosmopolitan scheme. Yet, a legal form of rights-based citizenship risks being too controversial to command the legitimacy and support needed for it to work, while a form of political citizenship that might provide it with the necessary authority seems unworkable on a world scale.
Indeed, some proponents of this view end up reading almost all conceivable rights as being somehow linked to the rights of democratic citizenship. Yet, by entrenching these rights in legally protected constitutions that are immune from political influence, this proposal paradoxically ends up subverting the actual exercise of democratic citizenship.
Likewise, action to protect the environment involves international agreements to collectively reduce emissions or regulate other activities, such as over-fishing depleted fish stocks. These sorts of agreements involve countries giving up short-term advantages for a long-term common benefit and are designed to prevent any one of them free-riding on the actions of others — for example, by continuing to pollute while other countries cut their emissions, thereby reaping the environmental advantages without paying any of the costs.
It is certainly in order that prospective citizens should show a degree of commitment to their chosen country, usually by a moderate residency requirement, and be able to operate as full members of their new country. But it is invidious to set the membership criteria higher than most existing citizens could attain — for example, by demanding a standard of literacy in the dominant language only achieved by the highly educated.
To enjoy the promise of civic equality that the status of citizenship holds out, all citizens had to play their part in the political process. Otherwise, instead of a situation of ruling and being ruled in turn, a citizen would simply be ruled. Indeed, our word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiotes, a term used to describe someone who concentrated entirely on their private affairs to the neglected of the public realm. These days, most of us tend to be idiots in this respect.
Political citizenship is rejected as both too demanding and of dubious worth. People increasingly adopt what I called the imperial Roman view of legal citizenship. They place their faith in the courts and other supposedly impartial, expert regulatory bodies to provide an equitable framework for their activities, rejecting politics as at best ineffective, at worst pernicious.
People of England were free only during the election of MPs. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.
At its most extreme, a radical democratic position becomes almost synonymous with anarchism. According to this view, people can rule themselves democratically only if they take every decision, can weigh up all alternatives, and come to an unanimous conclusion. Otherwise, the minority in any vote will be ruled by the majority rather than ruling themselves. Yet it does not take much thought to see how difficult this result would be to achieve in practice.
Regarding democracy as a system of self-rule denies the very need for such common structures because it suggests we all ought to be able somehow to get what we want. Worse, it potentially subverts the search for equitable solutions by allowing individuals to hold out against any changes that might threaten their existing privileges. By contrast, a more citizenship-centered view of the democracy regards it as a fair process whereby we settle our differences and pursue our collective ends on an equal basis — accepting that of necessity this involves ruling and being ruled in turn.
He maintained that democracy was analogous to handing the running of a ship to the passengers rather than entrusting it to a captain. He reasoned government was likewise a matter for those who had the capacity for and had learned the art of governing.
The difficulty is that this analogy breaks down at a number of places.
First, there is no “objective” science of either the ends that governments should pursue, or necessarily of the best means to realize them. Consequently, though the captain may deal with the technicalities of sailing the ship, it is the passengers who rightly determine its destination.
Second, unless we assume experts to be unfailingly selfless and altruistic as well as omniscient, there is no guarantee that they will rule for the benefit of others rather than themselves.
In competing for people’s votes during elections, parties have an incentive to build, or in a multi-party system to be part of, a winning coalition. So they try and develop or form part of a package of policies that will reflect people’s most preferred ranking on different issues. They achieve this result by converging on the median voter — that is, the voter whose preference rankings are at the midpoint between the two extremes. That convergence is something mistakenly criticized for failing to give voters a choice. However, the opposite turns out to be the case — it is actually the result of parties seeking to maximize the degree to which they reflect voter choice.
Meanwhile, party discipline keeps representatives to their electoral pledges. An aspect of the participatory critique of representative government is that once elected representatives are free to do as they please. However, contemporary parties remain remarkably faithful to their electoral commitments. Though the tendency of parties to force their representatives to vote on block is often criticized on Burkean grounds by media commentators, is is in fact essential for their accountability to the judgments of the electorate.
Somewhat oddly from a democratic perspective, this attentiveness of politicians to the views of the electorate is occasionally criticized as revealing how they will do anything for power. Yet that criticism is as nonsensical as attacking commercial firms for pandering to the wishes of customers simply to make a profit. Just as markets exploit the entrepreneur’s desire for a profit to the customers’ advantage by using competition to prompt them to innovate and lower costs so as to maintain or increase their market share, so democratic systems employ electoral competition for the benefit of voters by harnessing the desire of politicians for power and their fear of losing it to make them responsive to policy failures and the evolving views of the ruled.
One group, characterized as the affluent “contented majority,” have become more ambivalent about electoral politics as they have grown increasingly unwillingly to contribute to collective goods from which they may only benefit indirectly. They seek a more direct correlation, akin to that enjoyed by customers in the market, between what they pay and what they get as individuals. In consequence, they are inclined to accept a gradual privatization of many hitherto public services, such as health, education, and even the police. Privatization undermines civic attitudes not so much through private suppliers providing public goods and services, which in certain cases may produce gains in terms of efficiency compared to a state-run provider, as when such goods become perceived as private consumables rather than a collective responsibility, that ought by right to be supplied to all citizens on an equitable basis. If a family has private health insurance and does not use the public education system, they will be less inclined to support their provision at public expense for others.
Of course, the issue they care the most about may be the one they are in a minority on, but the “intensity” of that situation is likely to be mitigated by their getting their way on may other (for them) lesser issues. Such balancing occurs as much within as between parties — especially in predominantly two-party systems. The resulting need for everyone to compromise is often misguidedly denigrated as unprincipled. However, it is precisely this need that produces toleration and mutual recognition between citizens, enabling all to be seen as equals and to some degree be included within any winning majority. Even when one’s most favored party is in opposition, at least some of one’s preferences are likely to be adopted by the governing party, and possibly promoted better by them than one’s own preferred party.
When vertical divisions predominate, such inclusiveness is harder to achieve. Although many cross-cutting issues may exist, the prime identity will be ethnicity, religion, or nationality and all other issues will be subordinated to it. In Belgium, for example, there are Flemish- and French-speaking conservative and socialist parties, but their collaboration is mitigated by the predominance of the cultural and linguistic divide.
In such cases, voting rarely influences the policy choices of governments because its main purpose is to obtain influence for one’s cultural group. Here the danger of minority oppression is greater because of the separation between the two groups.
Citizenship and democratic politics stand and fall together. To seek to divorce the two undermines not just the possibility of political citizenship, but the values associated with the very idea of citizenship itself.