Citizenship is a membership in the political community of and allegiance to a sovereign state. Though citizenship is often conflated with nationality in today's English-speaking world, international law does not usually use the term citizenship to refer to nationality; these two notions are conceptually different dimensions of collective membership.
Generally, citizenships have no expiration and allow persons to work, reside and vote in the polity, as well as identify with the polity, possibly acquiring a passport. Though, through discriminatory laws, like disfranchisement and outright apartheid, citizens have been made second-class citizens. Historically, populations of states were mostly subjects, while citizenship was a particular status which originated in the rights of urban populations, like the rights of the male public of cities and republics, particularly ancient city-states, giving rise to a civitas and the social class of the burgher or bourgeoisie. Since then states have expanded the status of citizenship to most of their national people, with the extent of citizen rights differing between states.
Definition
Theories A person can be recognized as a citizen on a number of bases. Nationality. Nationality and citizenship are generally indissociable, citizenship being in most cases a consequence of nationality. Place of residence. In some countries citizens residing outside of country of citizenship can vote. Citizenship by honorary conferment. This type of citizenship is conferred to an individual as a sign of honour. Excluded categories. In the past, there have been exclusions on entitlement to citizenship on grounds such as skin color, ethnicity, sex, land ownership status, and free status (not being a slave). Most of these exclusions no longer apply in most places. Modern examples include some Gulf countries which rarely grant citizenship to non-Muslims, e.g. Qatar is known for granting citizenship to foreign athletes, but they all have to profess the Islamic faith in order to receive citizenship. The United States grants citizenship to those born as a result of reproductive technologies, and internationally adopted children born after 27 February 1983. Some exclusions still persist for internationally adopted children born before 27 February 1983, even though their parents meet citizenship criteria.
Citizenship is seen by most scholars as culture-specific, in the sense that the meaning of the term varies considerably from culture to culture, and over time. In China, for example, there is a cultural politics of citizenship which could be called "peopleship", argued by an academic article.
The civic-republican or sometimes classical or civic humanist conception of citizenship emphasizes man's political nature and sees citizenship as an active process, not a passive state or legal marker. It is relatively more concerned that government will interfere with popular places to practice citizenship in the public sphere. Citizenship means being active in government affairs. According to one view, most people today live as citizens according to the liberal-individualist conception but wished they lived more according to the civic-republican ideal. An ideal citizen is one who exhibits "good civic behavior". Free citizens and a republic government are "mutually interrelated." Citizenship suggested a commitment to "duty and civic virtue".
Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and duties.
Rights of a citizen
Citizenship is described as "a bundle of rights -- primarily, political participation in the life of the community, the right to vote, and the right to receive certain protection from the community, as well as obligations."
The liberal-individualist or sometimes liberal conception of citizenship suggests that citizens should have entitlements necessary for human dignity. It assumes people act for the purpose of enlightened self-interest. According to this viewpoint, citizens are sovereign, morally autonomous beings with duties to pay taxes, obey the law, engage in business transactions, and defend the nation if it comes under attack, but are essentially passive politically, and their primary focus is on economic betterment. This idea began to appear around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became stronger over time, according to one view. According to this formulation, the state exists for the benefit of citizens and has an obligation to respect and protect the rights of citizens, including civil rights and political rights. It was later that so-called social rights became part of the obligation for the state.
Citizenship generally describes a person with legal rights within a given political order. It almost always has an element of exclusion, meaning that some people are not citizens and that this distinction can sometimes be very important, or not important, depending on a particular society. In most countries the majority of citizens don't agree that citizens and non-citizens should have same rights (discrimination based on nationality).
Citizenship as a concept is generally hard to isolate intellectually and compare with related political notions since it relates to many other aspects of society such as the family, military service, the individual, freedom, religion, ideas of right, and wrong, ethnicity, and patterns for how a person should behave in society. When there are many different groups within a nation, citizenship may be the only real bond that unites everybody as equals without discrimination—it is a "broad bond" linking "a person with the state" and gives people a universal identity as a legal member of a specific nation.
Responsibilities of a citizen Every citizen has obligations that are enshrined by law and some responsibilities that benefit the community. Obeying the laws of a country and paying taxes are some of the obligations required of citizens by law. Voting and community services form part of responsibilities of a citizen that benefits the community. Before the revolutionary liberté, égalité, fraternité was popularized in 1789, the Austria-Hungary dual monarchy established imperial citizenship, potentially for all of its subjects, provided that the tax payer was independent of the local nobility. Legal equality was extended to subjects who were willing to comply in much of the Habsburg empire with the 1811 Civil Code.
Responsibility is an action that individuals of a state or country must take note of in the interest of a common good. These responsibilities can be categorised into personal and civic responsibilities.
Scholars suggest that the concept of citizenship contains many unresolved issues, sometimes called tensions, existing within the relation, that continue to reflect uncertainty about what citizenship is supposed to mean. Some unresolved issues regarding citizenship include questions about what is the proper balance between duties and rights. Another is a question about what is the proper balance between political citizenship versus social citizenship. Some thinkers see benefits with people being absent from public affairs, since too much participation such as revolution can be destructive, yet too little participation such as total apathy can be problematic as well. Citizenship can be seen as a special elite status, and it can also be seen as a democratizing force and something that everybody has; the concept can include both senses. According to sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe, citizenship is based on the extent that a person can control one's own destiny within the group in the sense of being able to influence the government of the group. One last distinction within citizenship is the so-called consent descent distinction, and this issue addresses whether citizenship is a fundamental matter determined by a person choosing to belong to a particular nation––by their consent––or is citizenship a matter of where a person was born––that is, by their descent.
History
Polis
Many thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben in his work extending the biopolitical framework of Foucault's History of Sexuality in the book, Homo Sacer, point to the concept of citizenship beginning in the early city-states of ancient Greece, although others see it as primarily a modern phenomenon dating back only a few hundred years and, for humanity, that the concept of citizenship arose with the first laws. Polis meant both the political assembly of the city-state as well as the entire society. Citizenship concept has generally been identified as a western phenomenon. There is a general view that citizenship in ancient times was a simpler relation than modern forms of citizenship, although this view has come under scrutiny. The relation of citizenship has not been a fixed or static relation but constantly changed within each society, and that according to one view, citizenship might "really have worked" only at select periods during certain times, such as when the Athenian politician Solon made reforms in the early Athenian state. Citizenship was also contingent on a variety of biopolitical assemblages, such as the bioethics of emerging Theo-Philosophical traditions. It was necessary to fit Aristotle's definition of the besouled (the animate) to obtain citizenship: neither the sacred olive tree nor spring would have any rights.
An essential part of the framework of Greco-Roman ethics is the figure of Homo Sacer or the bare life.
Historian Geoffrey Hosking in his 2005 Modern Scholar lecture course suggested that citizenship in ancient Greece arose from an appreciation for the importance of freedom. Hosking explained:
Slavery permitted slave-owners to have substantial free time and enabled participation in public life. Polis citizenship was marked by exclusivity. Inequality of status was widespread; citizens (πολίτης politēs < πόλις 'city') had a higher status than non-citizens, such as women, slaves, and resident foreigners (metics). The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived in the ancient Greek times, in small-scale organic communities of the polis. The obligations of citizenship were deeply connected to one's everyday life in the polis. These small-scale organic communities were generally seen as a new development in world history, in contrast to the established ancient civilizations of Egypt or Persia, or the hunter-gatherer bands elsewhere. From the viewpoint of the ancient Greeks, a person's public life could not be separated from their private life, and Greeks did not distinguish between the two worlds according to the modern western conception. The obligations of citizenship were deeply connected with everyday life. To be truly human, one had to be an active citizen to the community, which Aristotle famously expressed: "To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god!" This form of citizenship was based on the obligations of citizens towards the community, rather than rights given to the citizens of the community. This was not a problem because they all had a strong affinity with the polis; their own destiny and the destiny of the community were strongly linked. Also, citizens of the polis saw obligations to the community as an opportunity to be virtuous, it was a source of honor and respect. In Athens, citizens were both rulers and ruled, important political and judicial offices were rotated and all citizens had the right to speak and vote in the political assembly.
Roman ideas