At its core, citizenship is a legal status, although increasingly political theorists are seeking to return the concept to an earlier usage when it was, in their view, much more than that. As a legal status the grant of citizenship gives people rights in the political system they inhabit. At minimum there will be the right to be domiciled in and take part in the political mechanisms of the state, usually through voting. There will also be the status of legal equality with all others and the entitlement to be treated thus in the court—what the American Bill of Rights calls equal protection and due process of the law. In most modern liberal democracies citizenship also ensures the protection of other human rights and civil liberties, not all of which may be available to people who have the right of abode in the country. With lesser rights than a citizen, a subject is someone who owes loyalty to a political sovereign but has no right to partake in the decision-making processes of the system.
A subject may have other rights, particularly the rather diffuse right to be protected by the power he is subject to when abroad, but a subject does not have the right of political participation.
The concept of citizenship comes to us from the Greek democracies and, with somewhat of a change in emphasis, the Roman Republic. For the Greeks a citizen was one of the equal participating élite in a society where the numerical bulk of the population, women, slaves and resident aliens, on whom the prosperity of the society largely depended, had no such right. Neither did they share all of the duties: only a citizen could be expected to take up arms in defence of the society, a distinction usually accepted by modern democracies when applying conscription laws.
Recently there have been attempts to claim that the full conception of citizenship involves a broader duty: concern with the common interest and a sense of communal purpose and values. Thus citizenship is contrasted with a more individualistic orientation where one has no duty other than narrowly-defined legal duties and where the pursuit of self-interest protected by one’s rights within the state is fully legitimate and all that can be expected or asked of the citizen. Thus communitarian theorists seek to place citizenship in a set of value preferences, rather than making it a purely procedural concept.
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