Complex Citizenships: Between Universalism and Particularism?

Abstract

The concept of citizenship is intrinsically complex and ambiguous as a result of the different and historically specific ways in which the concept has been used. The concept developed originally in the city states of ancient Greece and Rome. The etymology of the word from the Latin civitas or ‘body of citizens’ highlights the extent to which the original conception of citizenship was connected to membership of a city and this was reflected in the modern meaning of citizenship which was constituted by ‘membership’ of a nation with settled and stable boundaries. The social membership associated with modern citizenship implied a set of rights and obligations between individual citizens and the state. Throughout the modern period, however, the scope of membership and the composition of the political community were highly contested, and a central objective of social and political mobilization by subaltern social movements was to widen the definition of citizenship to include hitherto excluded groups and individuals. In the Western world, the apogee of modern citizenship occurred in the immediate postwar period with the development of the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) and the development of universal systems of social rights and social protection. The universalism of the Enlightenment ideologies that underpinned the KWS were never realized in practice, and during the past three decades the model of universal modern citizenship has been challenged and marginalized by alternative conceptions of citizenship.