Citizenship

Citizenship as a Juridical Status of Membership

The first element identifies the juridical foundation of citizenship as a status of membership in a political entity (often national but not exclusively so) that is juridically codified. In this regard, citizenship is often linked to nationality, which entails the recognition of rights and obligations associated with this status; in most nation-states, this criterion of nationality is still the condition for inclusion in the citizen community. With the development of migration trends and with the diversification in the scales of citizenship, the residency criterion is also sometimes taken into account to facilitate the civic integration of those who live in a nation or other juridically defined territory without full membership as a citizen of that nation-state or other group. This juridical foundation is at the center of the sociological debate put forward by Thomas Marshall when, during his famous conference in Cambridge in 1949 (see Gershon Shafir, 1998, chap. 6), he made citizenship a federative concept for political science. For Marshall, who was particularly concerned about the coherence of an English society threatened by class divisions, the interest in this concept lies in the ability of the juridical status to guarantee equal rights to all citizens. In the now established fashion, Marshall characterizes citizenship as consisting of three components: (1) the civil element, that is, individual rights such as freedom of the person, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, right of ownership, right to sign contracts, right to a fair legal system, and so on; (2) the political element, including the right to participate in political activity, right to run for office, right to vote, right to petition, and so on; and (3) the social element, mainly through the free and equal access to its social welfare system. Heavily influenced by the British historical experience, this liberal and evolutionary model of citizenship still reflects an interest in putting the status of citizenship into a historical perspective that includes the birth of the constitutional state, the advent of universal suffrage, and the birth of the welfare state, all of which encouraged the progressive expansion of such a juridically codified social role. Here, citizenship is a type of indicator of political modernity. This perspective on citizenship, contested by many critics of Marshall, especially Albert Hirschmann, is based on the evolution of Western societies in which these societies moved away from feudalism and its system of discriminatory orders. Since the introduction of this argument, many works have completed this model by including new elements; in particular, scholars such as Will Kymlicka (1995) have added an important cultural dimension that establishes the notion of “multicultural citizenship,” which is intended to take into account cultural, linguistic, or religious diversity. However, in American Citizenship, Judith Shklar (1991) shows that the symbolic possession of citizenship status is often just as important and sometimes even more fundamental than the actual practice of rights attached to it. Taking the example of American citizenship, for a long time denied to those of African ancestry and linked to the practice of slavery until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Shklar argues that for many who have benefited from the fight for civil rights, what is important is not only the regular practice of rights as the recognition of a juridical and a political status that give a minimum of social dignity but also this symbolic recognition.

...