CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship REFERS TO A relationship between an individual and

a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is
entitled to its protection. Citizenship implies the status of freedom
with accompanying responsibilities. Citizens have certain rights,
duties, and responsibilities that are denied or only partially
extended to aliens and other noncitizens residing in a country.
Marshall argued that citizenship is attached to the full membership
of a community. Possession of this status entails equal respect to
the set of rights and obligations to the community. Thus, the
citizenship as an identity became related to a political community.
The political community bears a national character with a given
territoriality which is attached by citizenship. Then an individual to
be a citizen must be linked to a particular nationality.

classical conception
The term classical denotes two important senses for our
understanding. Pocock (1995) explains this in two important ways.
First, the classical is referred to be expressed ‘as an ideal in durable
and canonical form though in practice the authority is always
conveyed in more ways than by its simple preservation in that form.
Second, it is referred to in terms of classical times, which we always
refer to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean, in particular
to Athens in the fifth century and fourth century B.Cs. and to Rome
from the third century B.C. to first A. D.
The concept of citizenship first arose in towns and city-
states of ancient Greece, where it generally applied
to property owners but not to women, slaves, or the poorer
members of the community. A citizen in a Greek city-state was
entitled to vote and was liable to taxation and military service.
The Romans first used citizenship as a device to distinguish the
residents of the city of Rome from those peoples whose territories
Rome had conquered and incorporated. As their empire continued to
grow, the Romans granted citizenship to their allies
throughout Italy proper and then to peoples in other Roman
provinces, until in 212 CE citizenship was extended to all free
inhabitants of the empire. Roman citizenship conferred important
legal privileges within the empire.
In the Greek tradition the notion of citizenship was coined with the
term republicanism. It suggests that the concept of citizenship is
related to the citizen’s obligation toward dispensing of duties of the
state. In this sense, it is imperative on the part of the citizen to rule
and to be ruled. On the other hand, the Roman tradition represents a
different set of values very much attached to the well-being of the
individuals. It recognizes that citizenship is attached to the rights
linked to the possession of the material things. Before the advent of
the early modern state the conception of citizenship was attached to
the legal and civil rights of the individual. The early stages of modern
period the development of the concept took place in the writings of
Pufendorf and Hobbes.
The Greek conception of Citizenship
Sparta
Approximately about 700 B.C; a cluster of four villages in the south of
the Peloponnese Peninsula formed the Polis, the city state of Sparta.
From their four villages the Spartans gradually expanded, annexing
their neighbours’ lands to the east.
The Facets of Spartan Citizenship
The essential facets of Spartan mode of citizenship were the
principle of equality, ownership of a portion of public land, economic
reliance on the work of the helots, a rigorous regime of upbringing
and training, the taking of meals in common messes, military
service , the attributive of civic virtue and participation of the
government of the state. the Spartan citizenry were economically
dependent on slave labour; the whole Lycurgen concept of
citizenship was founded on this system. e. For military service they
go through rigorous training. During their twenties the young men
were quasi-citizens, with military duties but without civic rights and
responsibilities.
Problems with Spartan Citizenship
Three great historians gave us the details about the declining figure
of the Spartan citizenship. They are Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Xenophon. Gradually, in Sparta, there was growing inequality
between the rich and the poor which led to the social imbalance. It
affected the prime objective of stability for citizenship. The poorer
people could not be able to pay their mess fee and consequently
they were debarred from the status of citizenship. Therefore, foreign
families were recruited to citizenship and Spartan families were
ceased to hold the status of citizenship.
Athens

One of the most useful sources for the history and working of
Athenian citizenship is a study, ‘The Athenian Constitution’, which
was probably written by one of Aristotle’s students under his
supervision Solon gave citizens easier access to the law than hitherto
and classified them He divided the citizens into four classes by as
assessment of wealth, as they had been divided before: the five
hundred bushel class, the cavalry, the rankers and the labourers.
Three top classes by wealth – reckoned in dry and liquid
measurements of produce – were relatively privileged. Nevertheless,
membership of the Assembly and jury- courts – the sole privilege of
the lowest class – were still very real citizenship rights.
Further reforms were forthcoming at the end of the sixth century,
devised by Cleisthenese. His measures are usually taken as the
inauguration of the Athenian democratic age, that is, 508-332. His
reforms were based on a rather complicated clustering of citizens
into various groupings, cutting across the ancient clan allegiances
and Solon’s four class
In the middle of the fifth century some other changes were
introduced to strengthen the powers of the Assembly. Also of
importance was the introduction by Pericles of payments of
attendance at the jury-courts, so that the poor would be able
exercise this citizenly right. However, he reduced the number of
citizens by a law requiring that the status be restricted to legitimate
sons of Athenian mothers as well as fathers
The III rd Book of Politics written by Aristotle discusses the nature of
citizenship. The vision of Aristotle the notion of citizenship was to
understand the relationship between city and regime. Aristotle’s
formulation of citizenship strictly separates public from private - of
polis from oikos - of persons and actions from things. The basic
qualification of a citizen is that he is a patriarch of a household or
oikos, where he controls the slaves and women but at the same time
free from household burdens to participate in public domain as
equals. The matter of the fact that has to be discussed in the
legislature purely conceives with facts of polis. Generally no private
discussions happen to take place in this type public deliberation.
Politics, Aristotle considers is a good in itself, not the pre-requisite of
the pubic good but the public good or res publica correctly defined
The Roman Conception of Citizenship
Roman citizenship is, in multiple ways, different from the Greek
citizenship. Roman citizenship is characterized in a stable and a
flexible sense. They understood citizenship by instituting into
different grades. It also afforded opportunities to slaves to acquire
the status and dignity of citizenship. It is also featured to the extent
that of granting citizenship generously to individuals beyond the city;
even it was projected in terms of world citizenship inherent in world
empire.
The status of citizenship in Rome was detached from an ethic of
participation and became a thin and legalistic concept. For a vast
majority of Roman citizens, citizenship was reduced to a judicial
safeguard instead of a status that denoted political agency. In fact,
the concept was stretched to breaking point and citizenship became
little more than an expression of the rule of law.
Citizenship finally found voice as a massively influential political
concept in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the world-
historical events of the American War of Independence and the
French Revolution. Th e French Revolution (1789) can be seen as a
revolt against the passive citizenship of the late medieval and early
modern times. Th e revolution attempted to resurrect the ideals of
active participation against the claims of the monarchical/imperial
state. Apart from attempting to change the apolitical/passive lives of
citizens, the French revolutionary tradition introduced an important
element to citizenship, which changed the way rights were
incorporated into the notion of citizenship. Th e Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen, which followed in the wake of the
revolution, brought in the notion of the citizen as a ‘free and
autonomous individual’ who enjoyed rights equally with others and
participated in making decisions which all agreed to obey
According to Machiavelli, citizenship was not to be passively
enjoyed, but actively exercised as a duty and obligation stemming
from concern for the good of the community as much as from self-
interest. Rousseau considered ‘General Will’ to be citizens
contributing without thought of personal advantage to political
decisions.
CONCLUSION
, citizenship provides a terrain for a number of contesting views over
its form and substance. Historically, civic republicanism formed the
most influential understanding of citizenship. The dominant
understanding of citizenship today comes from the liberal tradition,
which sees it as constituting a set of individual rights. Most
contemporary contractarian liberals, especially since the 1971
publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, claim that a liberal
account of justice uniquely permits citizens of diverse beliefs and
backgrounds to form, revise and pursue their own conceptions of the
good. Despite these divergences, the conception of citizenship has
today raised a host of important questions, and addresses
inequalities among nation-states in the world. It focuses our
attention on questions of rights, freedom and equality, political
allegiance to the state, civic loyalties within the community, cultural
and emotional ties and identities that mediate the relationship
between citizens and the state.