What is Citizenship by Derek Heater

Author:Derek Heater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Citizenship as nationality: origins

For two hundred years citizenship and nationality have been political Siamese twins. Before the late eighteenth century the relationship was much looser than we have been accustomed to assume, and the connection is loosening again in our own age as multiple and world citizenships become increasingly evident. Without delving too deeply into the historical pattern, let us just indicate how this adhesion occurred.

In the mid-eighteenth century four ideas central to our purpose coexisted in European political thought: cosmopolitanism, citizenship, patriotism and nation. The first three derived from the classical revival of the mini-renaissance of the Enlightenment – cosmopolitanism from the Stoic tradition; citizenship and patriotism from the civic republican. Cosmopolitanism was held as an unspecific feeling of the essential unity and harmony of humankind. Citizenship was an assertion of freedom from arbitrary power, and usually intimately bound up with patriotism, the sense of loyalty to and duty to defend one’s state. A nation was a group of people speaking the same language and not necessarily synonymous with the population of a state.

An individual could think of himself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen-patriot and a member of a nation simultaneously as different identities yet with neither a sense of inner contradiction nor of a need for close bonds. There was nevertheless a loose linkage relating them all. Cosmopolitanism stressed the importance of the individual in the universal order and therefore connected to the civic ideal of a citizen’s freedom and equality with his fellows. Patriotism was a crucial element in the republican concept of citizenship; indeed, it was widely held that true patriotism was impossible without the freedom that was guaranteed by the status of citizen. Nor was patriotism a necessary antithesis to cosmopolitanism as long as one honoured one’s enemies and did not sink into rank pride and xenophobia. The concept of nation could also sit happily with cosmopolitanism; for the linguistic and cultural divisions of humankind were not deeply cleft antagonisms, merely expressions of the ‘spirits’ of the several nations (a term coined in France by Montesquieu and in Germany by Moser).

But not only could these four concepts live in concord with each other, they in essence together represented a mode of thought and feeling opposed to the autocratic and aristocratic political reality of the time – whatever some privileged propagandists might have averred to the contrary.

The word ‘nation’ was not, in fact, very commonly used until the mid-century. From then, however, it was to be heard with increasing frequency and with adaptations of meaning. Its development in France is especially instructive, where ‘nation’ came to be synonymous with ‘patrie’ and ‘peuple’. It connoted the unity of the French people and its territory, fusing the classes and provinces. In their battle with the monarchy the privileged and politically ambitious parlements used ‘nation’ in contradistinction to ‘roi’: they claimed to stand for the interests of the nation against the abuse of royal power. Rousseau, on the other hand, employed this new sense of the word for a totally different purpose.

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