In a lecture at Harvard during my freshman year, a professor—who may have been Martin Peretz—offered an insight that left a profound impact upon me. “Citizen,” the professor noted, was a unique and quite revolutionary concept. Different from many other terms, e.g., “comrade,” the notion of citizen implied a specific relationship between an individual and the polity. It specifically suggested a role for the individual within a state system in which said individual was a participant/actor rather than an observer.
Since the resurrection of the concept of “citizen,” in the context of the French Revolution, the term along with “citizenship” has been contested terrain.(1) There is no universally accepted criteria as to how one becomes a citizen of a nation-state. Countries differ greatly on whether being born in a particular territory is sufficient for such definition; under what conditions one can apply to become a citizen; how and under what circumstances can one’s children become citizens? These questions are not answered the same way in any number of Earth’s nation-states.
Despite this unclarity, the notion of citizenship remains a powerful concept and one which people insist on fighting to achieve. It demarcates freedom vs. slavery; it offers the formality of participation. Yet most importantly, citizenship offers legitimacy and visibility. Citizenship assumes that one’s history and life are relevant to the larger polity and, by implication, that one shares in the larger historical narrative. The fight to define and achieve citizenship becomes a fight to define and achieve recognition of one’s humanity.
II
The transformation of global capitalism over the last 40 years has catalyzed the transformation of the concept of citizenship, in some ways making it unrecognizable from most other periods of the so-called modern era.
Traditional citizenship exists between an individual and a nation-state. One is a citizen of a nation-state and has certain rights and responsibilities. This concept, of course, says nothing about the extent to which such rights and responsibilities are meaningful and have any content. They exist at the level of “formal” relationships.