Following the ideas of Faulks (2013), one way to classify citizenship is according to different periods in history, starting from the ancient Greek to the present day. Changes in the way to classify or understand citizenship are based on changes in the nature of the democratic political community and the qualities needed to be a citizen. As Bellamy & Palumbo (2010, iv) argue:
…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 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that still provide the primary context for citizenship today.
Starting from the Athenian polis, most current understandings of citizenship are influenced by how thinkers constructed this polis. Citizenship was a status, the communities were defined on a small scale, the extent of citizenship was exclusive and all types of inequality naturalised; the content was focused on obligations and the context for citizenship was the slave society and the agricultural production (Faulks, 2013). What makes a citizen in the Ancient Greek, as proposed by Aristotle, is the political nature of human beings, as he called it ‘men are political animals’ (as cited in Faulks, 2013). This political nature compels citizens to get involved in public issues, usually centred around common commitments to civic duty in governing and defending the state (Heater 1999; Faulks 2013). Lister (2003) points out that individual interests were submitted to the common good. For Aristotle (as cited in Marshall & Bottomore, 1992), the only way in which men can realise their full potential as political animals is by their participation in the affairs of a polis or, in other words, in the city-state. Another issue is that being born in a certain city-state does not guarantee the status of citizen, for example, resident foreigners and slaves were not citizens (Faulks, 2013, 169). There were privileged classes for which citizenship was not a matter of discussion. In this Ancient Greek society workers, slaves, women, and children were excluded from the benefits and status of citizenship. In other words, citizenship was essentially an inherited status (Heater, 1999).
In pre-modern times, citizenship did not include large sections of the populations, and especially women were excluded from it. The division between citizen and non-citizen signified inequalities that were taken to be natural and immutable.
From the XVII century (modern period), as Peled (2007, 103) states:
Citizenship has been characterised by three essential features: membership in a political community that transcends all other memberships a person might have, and that entails some degree of mutual responsibility between all members; a certain level of equality of rights guaranteed to all who are considered citizens; and an executive limited by the rule of law.
Modern citizenship was influenced by ideologies from liberalism. It proposed that all individuals have rights to life, liberty, and property; liberal ideologies defend equality and
freedom for all individuals and the political community as a guarantor of these freedoms. In words of Marshall (1950, 28):
Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community… all who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.
In modern periods, the community in which citizenship is recognised is a legal community. The key event was the French revolution, in which citizenship is ‘fused’ with the nation-state (Faulks, 2013). This relationship between citizenship and the nation-state and the idea of citizens being defined in relation to a membership to a certain state is discussed in next sections of this chapter. Citizenship has several components: the civil one is the right necessary for individual freedom (freedom of speech, religion, justice, to own property, etc.); the political component which is the right to participate in the exercise of political power as a member of a body invested with social authority or as an elector; and the social element which includes all the range of possible rights of individuals (Marshall, 1950).
The extent of citizenship is progressively inclusive and theoretical egalitarian but limited by statist context. The content of citizenship is rights and limited duties, and its context is patriarchal, racialised and founded on a capitalist state system, with an economy based on industrial production (Faulks, 2013). Modern citizenship definition entails an understanding of several interrelated components, as it has been said, the status of the citizenship itself, what this status ensures for those who hold it and the responsibilities, duties, and obligations that the state expects from its citizenry (Heater 2004). As Faulks (2013) points out, rights always require a framework for their recognition and mechanisms through which they can be fulfilled. Such a social structure, which includes several organisations and institutions, requires that citizens all play their part to maintain it. This means that citizenship implies duties and obligations.
Citizenship as a status was understood as that condition for which all individuals were able to fulfil their rights, making the society more egalitarian. According to Marshall and Bottomore (1992), to achieve an equal society the role of the state is to ensure welfare for all society. To pursue this goal, the state has to diminish the inequalities caused by capitalism (the dominant socioeconomic model), but to leave social class otherwise intact as capitalism benefits people from all social classes although at different rates. One of the
critiques of this concept is that Marshall does not recognise that capitalism is intrinsically unequal. Another critique, as Faulks (2006, 124) claims is ‘his focus upon the administration of rights by the agents of the state at the expense of the participatory aspects of citizenship’. The absence of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ in Marshall’s theory has also been criticised by the academia.
Faulks (2013) argues that liberals are ‘obsessed’ with defending abstract individual rights and have often overlooked the power structures that can either facilitate or constrain citizens in the exercise of their rights and the performance of their responsibilities. Thus, ‘citizenship was fragmented during the nineteenth century…as it was exclusionary, depriving indigenous peoples, blacks, women and other marginalised groups of public recognition’ (Roniger, 2006, 495).
In the late modern period, excluded social groups started to demand equality. As Faulks (2013, 3) comments:
Campaigns for the extension of citizenship have ranged from the anti-slavery movement in Britain in the eighteen century, women’s movements demanding the vote in the early twentieth century, African American in the 1960s campaigning for basic civil rights, to gay activists in the 1990s protesting that the age of consent is equalised with heterosexuals.
Along with these demands, western societies were facing contradictory social processes at different levels: local, regional, and global. These processes questioned the relationship between citizenship and the state as human beings are locally and globally bound to rights and responsibilities (Heater 2004).
This context of social demands and global context are the foundation for post-liberal citizenship, which includes ideas from socialism, republicanism, communitarianism, feminism and ecologism, amongst others. Joppke (2007, 38) proposes that citizenship is conceived as a combination of status, rights, and identity, but still intrinsically related to a state:
…in the status dimension, the most significant development in the past half century has been the liberalization of access to citizenship, removing sexual and racial barriers to naturalization and upgrading territory over descent in the birth attribution of citizenship. The inevitable result of this opening of the citizenry is its internal diversification along ethnic, racial, and religious
lines…With the ethnic diversification of society, the basis for social rights becomes brittle while other types of right move to the fore: rights of anti-discrimination and multicultural recognition. In post-liberal citizenship, social movements led by citizens has arisen worldwide. However, regardless the type of demand (sexual, multicultural, or ecological), it always entails demands on the state to do certain things. The issue is that states have lost part of the control and power over the people on so many fronts in the age of globalisation (Joppke, 2007). In this context, citizens are demanded to keep an active participation in society to meet their expectations and demands despite the lack of power of the state.
One of the issues that have largely influenced concepts and understandings of citizenship are neoliberal ideologies and capitalism as an economic system. The neoliberal citizenship has been justified by authors such as Hayek, Friedman and Murray, among others (King & Waldron, 1988). They criticise Marshallian concepts arguing that the role of the state should be to protect negative freedoms (civil and political rights), and to leave all other matters to the market. The central assumptions of conservative/neoliberal citizenship are in close alignment with the economies of neoliberalism. Its principal argument is that the role of the market is greater than the state's in economic matters, i.e. its emphases are the market, liberalisation, deregulation, decentralisation, privatisation, and a reduced role for the state (Chang & Grabel, 2004). In this view, the individual level has priority for this form of citizenship and the only obligation the state has is to protect rights, just preventing certain situations that may occur rather than taking any action when rights are not respected. Kennedy (2009) argues that under neoliberal conceptions the state ceases to be the primary provider of social welfare (health, education, transport, etc.) and these services are opened to the market. Therefore, citizens should be more active in the neoliberal state to guarantee the quality and type of services to which they are entitled. In other words, the citizen must develop self-regulation to ensure their rights are protected. Roniger (2006, 491) describes the context of countries influenced by neoliberal economies and ideologies as it follows:
In the context of growing socioeconomic gaps, impoverishment and marginalization, large segments of the population have practically lost contact with the state or are connected through new forms of clientelism, state corruption and crime.
Roniger (2006) also points out that the public domain has experienced a diversification and fragmentation in the context of Latin-American countries. Governments in the
continent have tried during the last three decades to enact alternative policy and anti- policies in parallel with new experiments in communitarian and bottom-up democracy to counteract negative neoliberal influences. These new scenarios of democracy have led to reassessments in what is meant by citizenship today and to trace back its uneven development in Latin America.
In a (neoliberal) globalised context, citizenship is often related to human capital ideas, i.e. citizens help to build a knowledge-based economy in which economic growth and human wellbeing are crucial. Barnett and Coate (2005) argue that a reproductive knowledge is needed for the pursuit economic development, and Hargreaves (2011) emphasises that one of the imperatives for the 21st century is the economic one for which the training of dynamic and responsible citizen leaders is crucial to build that economy. Zepke (2013, np) suggests that according to human capital ideas, active citizens should be ‘globally competent learners who vote, pay their taxes and contribute to the economic health of their society’.
Socialist/left social democratic citizenship is also analysed in this chapter. This citizenship is diametrically opposite to the neoliberal form. Dwyer (2010, 59) states: ‘a combination of Marxist scepticism and democratic socialist optimism has been influential in mapping out the Left’s position on social citizenship in recent decades’.
The main postulate of this approach is that the neoliberal model perpetuates and increases inequalities among individuals in a specific country and between countries. The elite exploits a large proportion of people throughout the world and individuals are understood as ‘users’ of the system. This approach also criticises the notion of ‘welfare state’ arguing that the state remains essentially capitalist, but now delivers social rights. Offe (1982) also claims that social rights (a notion from liberal citizenship) are repressive because, in order to access them, citizens are subject to the social control of state bureaucracies and these serve to hide the real causes of inequality inherent in capitalism. Having noted the limitations of citizenship related to social welfare (social democratic citizenship), Alcock (1989) argues that citizenship that really promotes and extends universal rights to welfare can benefit everybody and help to empower previously excluded groups. Contemporary left views see a reformulated notion of citizenship as having value in challenging the paternalistic assumptions and lack of accountability that characterised state welfare in the past (Dwyer, 2010).
The world economy has become more globalised, and the nation-state is more eroded by the global market. International corporations own the national economy on an increasing scale, and it may be that traditional forms of citizenship cannot express or do not correspond to the idea of a global market. Along with this phenomenon, Giddens (2003) describes the contemporary world as being consumer led; being consumers is most important than being citizens. They have adopted a more consumer-oriented and critical view of democratic politics and politicians have likewise treated citizens more like consumers and both marketised the public sector (Bellamy & Palumbo, 2010).
In the scenario described, several approaches have emerged as a response to the inequalities generated by both the welfare state and neoliberal systems. As it has been said, citizens have been protesting to demand respect for their rights. In a context of global capitalism, as Turner (1999, 266) argue, there is an emerging notion of human rights, which has to be respected:
Human rights are typically conferred upon people as humans irrespective of whether they are Australian, British, Chinese, Indonesian or whatever, but, because human rights legislation has been accepted by the nations of the world, people can claim human rights, even where they are stateless people or dispossessed refugees.
Other approaches emerge as a response to the prevailing model. Peterson and Knowles (2009) for example define the alternative model of communitarian and civic republican citizenship. For them, citizenship constitutes not simply a legal status but a practice that occurs as a member of a political community. In other words, from communitarian and civic republican positions, being a full citizen necessarily entails active participation in the political community (Crick, 2002).
This summary of different classifications of citizenship allows an overview of how historically the discussion about the concept of citizenship has been developed. Nowadays it is accepted that citizenship can often consist of an amalgamation of seemingly contradictory aspects drawn from different discourses (Bellamy & Palumbo, 2010; Faulks, 2013).