Citizenship is a central idea in the study of politics. The term also has powerful emotional appeal for many people. Acquiring and exercising the rights associated with citizenship are among the most universally held political aspirations. Indeed, for some it might be the ultimate purpose of political life. The term has also long been a building-block concept for scholars as well as for people seeking to exercise power. However, a great deal of contestation exists surrounding both the precise meaning of the term as well as its constitutive elements. Here, in chapter 1, we review and consider the most fundamental facets of citizenship and the contestations they have engendered. In this way, we survey some of the longest-running disagreements over how to define and understand citizenship.
A concept-clarification exercise such as this one aims to sort through different definitions and citizenship practices to identify the most significant areas of tension among scholars of the subject and to illuminate what those tensions can tell us about the concept. However, no such concept-clarification exercise can offer a final word on the subject it is discussing. This exercise cannot fully resolve contestation about what citizenship means, or stabilize the concept once and for all, or even forestall its evolution in inevitably unpredictable ways. However, insisting on clarity about the contestations that the term generates is vital for a few key reasons. Below we identify a few of the most critical:
In what follows, we begin with a note on why citizenship is an “essentially contested concept.” Next, we offer a concept-clarification exercise that is sub-divided into several discrete parts. We first discuss the question of who defines citizenship. We then proceed to a discussion of the assignment of citizenship. Here, we engage with the question of how determinations are made about who gets to belong to a polity and who gets excluded from it. Then we address the question of citizenship’s content. Finally, we conclude with a note about citizenship’s discreteness from a set of closely related terms.
There are many theories that stipulate the specific elements of and phenomena associated with citizenship. But no single authoritative definition of citizenship does or can exist. Citizenship has been said to be: a status, a standing, an institution, an instrument of political categorization, a set of actions related to virtue, civicness, a form of identification, a process, an affect, and various other things. This varied list points us to the fact that citizenship is one of what W. B. Gallie has termed “essentially contested concepts.”1 Many of the most studied concepts in the social sciences can be classified as “essentially contested” because there is no settled consensus on their specific meanings – their essence – and they do not lend themselves to any easy definitions. Yet, as John Gerring has suggested, “it is impossible to conduct work without using concepts. It is impossible even to conceptualize a topic . . . without putting a label on it.”2 Examples of essentially contested concepts include terms like: nation, state, populism, and so on. In a paper delivered to the Aristotelian Society in March 1956, Gallie first laid out a basic understanding of essentially contested concepts:
Different uses of the term[s] “work of art” or “democracy” or “Christian doctrine” subserve different though of course not altogether unrelated functions for different schools or movements of artists and critics, for different political groups and parties, for different religious communities and sects. Now once this variety of functions is disclosed it might well be expected that the disputes in which the above-mentioned concepts figure would at once come to an end. But in fact this does not happen. Each party continues to maintain that the special functions which the term “work of art” or “democracy” or “Christian doctrine” fulfils on its behalf or on its interpretation, is the correct or proper or primary, or the only important, function which the term in question can plainly be said to fulfil. Moreover, each party continues to defend its case with what it claims to be convincing arguments, evidence and other forms of justification.3
The reasons for this kind of dissensus are manifold. Sometimes the contestation is over who gets to define a given concept. Sometimes what appears to be a contested concept is simply an umbrella term for a range of subsidiary concepts, which results in confusion about what the term itself represents. A classic example of such ambiguity is the term “equal opportunity.” For some, the term represents the equality of starting points (say, everyone should have an equal chance at college admissions), while for others it represents at least a rough equality of outcomes (say, actual levels of college admissions should reflect the fact that everyone had an equal chance of getting into college). The same is true of a concept like the “American Dream.” For some people, the American Dream is about upward mobility, while for others it is about social and racial justice.4
Sometimes, the use of modifiers helps to clear up confusion about a concept. Thus, for Steven Lukes, the simple use of the word “individualism” is not very helpful because it is not clear what the term means. Consequently, Lukes suggests the drawing of distinctions between different forms of individualism, such as the political, methodological, abstract, and ethical forms of individualism.5 Similarly, in the case of a concept like “ideology,” Terry Eagleton finds at least six different bundles of meanings associated with the term.6 Others have argued that in certain cases we are dealing with “cluster concepts”: concepts that admit of a range of meanings, each one of which is equally valid. In the case of a concept like “politics,” say, Fred Frohock argues that we should avoid trying to come up with a definition of a term like “politics” because these concepts extend to a “range of events”7 which nonetheless share “family resemblances.”8 Instead, Frohock argues that we should seek to find some core terms around which any ordinary use of the given concept clusters. Equally, in the case of terms like “citizenship,” there are concerns about thresholds, in which scholars debate how much of any specific ingredient of citizenship (such as rights, virtues, actions, etc.) is required for any legitimate instantiation of the term. In the remainder of this chapter, we will specify the concept of citizenship and at the same time we delineate several different ways in which contestation about citizenship’s definition might persist.
One kind of conceptual confusion occurs because the term “citizenship” is sometimes stretched too wide. Using the term citizenship indiscriminately – for example, to refer to a disparate array of things such as activism, particular types of people, or abstract statuses – erodes the word’s conceptual precision. A second common misunderstanding occurs when citizenship is conflated with related terms that have distinct meanings. For example, many types of associations, communities, and organizations have bounded memberships that include some people and exclude others. Yet we do not say that members of a unit such as a congregation or a family are citizens of those groups. The reason we do not say this is not simply because these things are not explicitly political units. We do this because we recognize, in addition to the fact that these units are not political, that they also do not function via the rule of law in the way that a polity does. Distinguishing citizenship from very closely related but distinct concepts like nationality, civicness, and membership helps minimize conceptual contestation over citizenship. Similarly, citizenship can refer to individuals whose political relationships with the state do not have much in common. So, for example, citizenship can be defined by the actions and entitlements of fully rights-bearing members of democratic polities or of passport-bearing “nationals” of authoritarian nation-states who do not enjoy a great slate of civil liberties, as well as children the world over who cannot vote.9 Most often, citizenship is conflated with the possession of legal nationality: a passport and legal claims to reside in, move freely about, and reenter a sovereign state.10
In other words, variations abound. But does that mean that we can never agree on what constitutes citizenship? We think not. However, we do recognize that the task of clarifying what the concept of citizenship represents requires a series of responses. We focus here on what we think are four highly contested facets of the study of citizenship. These are:
Scholars often make explicit and implicit assumptions about who or what has the authority to determine what citizenship really is. Usually, these assumptions reflect their beliefs about where the authority to define citizenship should lie. At the risk of oversimplifying the nuances and complexities surrounding this question, one might say that two broad groups of thinking have emerged on this question: one group makes the role of norms and citizenly virtues central to their understanding of what defines citizenship, while the other does not.
A norm-based account of citizenship prioritizes how we ought to think about citizenship over what we can actually observe about citizenship in real life. Such an orientation is based on beliefs that certain norms – broad political ideals – ought to characterize citizenship. To people driven by norms, things like political participation, active involvement in politics at the local level, and a commitment to holding duties and obligations must be central to the concept of citizenship even when apparent struggles over goods – for example rights and equal standing – are taking place. Indeed, for some of these scholars, citizenship and norms are co-constituted. This line of inquiry inclines many to believe that citizens make citizenship through citizenly actions.11 It is premised on the notion that it is citizens themselves who determine the content of their membership through specific forms of voluntary political behavior that are considered citizenly.12
Others focus on how the state interacts with its subjects through law, policy, and starker exercises of power in order to arrive at an understanding of who or what defines citizenship. These thinkers define citizenship entirely without any reference to citizenly actions, such as political participation. For them, citizenship is defined by the rights that are bestowed by a state upon an individual. These rights can be about political participation, such as voting rights. But that does not mean that an individual’s citizenship depends upon their exercise of that right. In this view, citizenship theory is not about advancing a set of prescriptive recommendations about what constitutes citizenly actions and how much of these actions ought to be performed by citizens.
But normative accounts are to be found everywhere. If one looks carefully, one finds that theoretical scholarship on citizenship frequently shares with contemporary empirical studies of citizenship the assumption that norms have a singular power to justify who will be considered a citizen and what citizenship confers, as well as how those norms can be specified and applied. Much existing theoretical scholarship, for example, is explicitly normative and highly taken up with justifying why citizenship ought to be practiced in certain ways that involve the demonstration of citizenly behavior. Such approaches frequently de-emphasize analyses of how citizenship is actually instantiated and practiced in the real world. Equally, contemporary empirical work on citizenship can be normatively oriented, even though it is often implicitly so, in that it routinely produces studies of citizenship that focus on topics such as civic engagement to the exclusion of other things like social and cultural rights. Norms also present themselves, for example, when one thinks about the question of agency. For some theorists, citizenly behavior must be voluntary because state-mandated action lacks the intentionality that makes such activity virtuous. It is for this reason that liberal-democratic states generally demand minimal duties of their citizens.13 But the requirement that voluntariness and consent should be woven into citizenly behavior is itself a normative prescription.
Normative definitions of citizenship extrapolate what citizenship is from understandings or commitments about what citizenship should be. However, critics claim that extrapolating what citizenship is from a notion of what citizenship ought to be inevitably produces problematic conclusions. In this view, acts of citizenship are not, in and of themselves, constitutive of citizenship. Citizenship also cannot be conjured simply by acting as a citizen ought to or as most citizens seem to. After all, one cannot unilaterally declare oneself a citizen of a country and expect that this claim will be legitimized by others. That legitimacy requires recognition by a specific authority. Thus citizenship is, in an important sense, relational.
Relatedly, if citizenship could be conjured by one’s citizenly behavior, all kinds of boundary-enforcing laws would cease to be necessary. One may simply elect to gain representation, visibility, or specific goods via the performance of citizenly actions. Furthermore, there is little consensus on an enumeration or ordering of norms within the communities responsible for assigning citizenship. Only through institutional practices can we deduce how citizenship operates and what it actually is to, or represents for, the people who hold it or seek to hold it. For all these reasons, in this book, we do not privilege norms over practice. We take it as axiomatic that citizenship is as citizenship does, not as we wish it would do. This is a solidly realist approach to citizenship, insofar as we place more weight on actual citizenship practices than on aspirational ideals. Not all political theorists adopt a realist approach. However, we believe it is the best way to bridge the methods of political theory with the realities we can plainly observe in the world.
Any definition of citizenship must provide a rationale for determining who is considered a citizen. This determination requires settling who will be entitled to the content associated with membership. How one gains or loses citizenship is fundamental to defining that status, both for current and for aspiring citizens. As we say above, focusing solely on norms provides part of but not a complete basis for understanding how citizenship is assigned. Disjunctions between abstract notions of deservingness and the practical realities of how citizenship is awarded point toward instances in which compromises must be made, which often result in the offering of only partial forms of citizenship to some persons.
The act of assigning citizenship also inevitably involves making distinctions between members and nonmembers. To assign citizenship is to draw some kind of boundary. Citizenship is always and everywhere boundary creating. Indeed, a large part of the value that citizenship has is derived from the fact that it is a bounded category that excludes some and includes others. The demarcation of boundaries often implies scarcity, albeit an artificial and politically imposed form of scarcity rather than a natural one, but a scarcity nonetheless. Thus, it is frequently the case that citizenship in a given state is available to fewer people than who seek it. The terms on which citizenship is accorded to some and denied to others vary widely too. The specific mechanisms of scarcity depend on the political system from which citizenship law is derived. In addition, the demarcation of these boundaries conveys the promise that those on the inside of the boundaries will be accorded a form of legal status, political equality, and mutual respect that is not available to people outside of those boundaries. These promises are made even in the face of social inequalities that cannot be eliminated via institutional politics alone and without coercive practices. One cannot, for example, dictate that people actually give each other mutual respect. It can only be dictated that the law protects people equally. Important questions have been raised by citizenship scholars as to how we ought to refer to forms of citizenship that do not guarantee basic legal equality to everyone considered to be a citizen and what this means for the substantive content of being assigned the status of citizen.14
It is also important to note that the demarcated boundaries of citizenship sometimes, but not always, neatly overlap with other formations such as race, territory, language, nationality, religion, and others. Studying how citizenship is assigned, thus, requires that we study how states establish boundaries around their citizens and what kind of boundaries they can and should draw. As we discuss later, in chapter 4, a state can draw a boundary around a citizenry on the basis of a number of things, including both birthright and naturalization. Furthermore, birthright citizenship can entitle individuals to be counted within the boundaries of a citizenry in several different ways. One type of birthright citizenship takes the following form: if you are born within the geographical boundaries of a state then you are entitled to citizenship in it. The Latin expression jus soli – meaning law or right of soil – describes this approach best. Another takes this form: if one or both of your parents is a citizen of a country, you are eligible for citizenship in that country through your blood lineage. The Latin expression jus sanguinis – meaning law or right of blood – most aptly describes this approach.15
These two principles govern not just who acquires what type of nationality when they are born but also the range of choices open to adults who wish to change their status. One contradiction explored by citizenship theorists is the fact that birthright citizenship (either via blood lineage or via place of birth), which is currently a near-universal norm, has feudal connotations and reproduces on an international level the property-like features of aristocratic birth in premodern contexts.16 In other words, one’s entitlement to citizenship via birthright is reminiscent of the feudal practice in which one’s position in a feudal hierarchy was fixed at the time of one’s birth. In this view, birthright principles are never and can never be democratic because they do not reflect consent. No one chooses where or to whom they are born and, as a result, birthright citizenship is arbitrary and bases the deservingness of citizenship upon accidents of birth. Others, however, disagree on how much primacy scholars should place on the notion of consent. Not everyone agrees that the presence or absence of consent among those affected by a decision determines whether the decision is fair or just.
Democratic theorists also note concerns about deservingness and affected interest.17 Thus Robert Dahl has described a tension between two divergent means of defining the institution of citizenship: one is categorical and the other is contingent. The categorical principle requires that “Every person subject to a government and its laws has an unqualified right to be a member of the demos (i.e., a citizen).”18 The contingent principle dictates that “only persons who are qualified to govern, but all such persons, should be members of the demos.”19 Each principle refers to a different way of thinking about democracy. It is reasonable to think that a democracy would not subject people to laws of a state of which they are not citizens. On the other hand, Dahl invokes the case of children to illustrate a group that is routinely excluded from the demos – say, by being denied voting rights – due to their incompetence in political matters. This example challenges the categorical idea that every individual subject to the laws of a state is a full-fledged citizen of the polity.
Dahl offers a resolution to this conflict in a “modified categorical principle,” stating that “every adult subject to a government and its law must be presumed to be qualified as, and has an unqualified right to be, a member of the demos.”20 For Dahl, inclusion ought to be based upon the following standard: “The demos must include all adult members of the association except transients and persons proved to be mentally defective.”21 He therefore flags maturity, capacity, and an ongoing temporal relationship to the space associated with a given demos as the most significant indicators of, or requirements for, citizenship.
Dahl’s theory raises more questions than it answers and illustrates the problems inherent in defining the boundaries of a contested category. The modified categorical principle of membership invites disputes related to boundary and threshold. How do we know when someone is no longer a child and becomes a mature adult? Moreover, rationality constitutes only one example of a quality that lends ambiguity to the question of a threshold for citizenship qualification. Innumerable others exist and serve as bases for legal and philosophical contestation. Foreignness and transience themselves are murky concepts.22 As in the case of trying to decide the line between childhood and maturity, the threshold between foreignness and un-foreignness is also difficult to draw. How are we supposed to identify the line someone crosses when they go from being a foreigner to being subject to all laws of the land, and therefore a citizen? Why should citizens be forced to accept any child born within their polity as a citizen if they never consented to the birth of that person within their polity and given the fact that the child itself clearly has no say in having been born there? On the other hand, why should consent matter in this context? It is also the case that most liberal democracies do not automatically take away the citizenship rights of those who are intellectually disabled or members of cults, yet children and most foreigners are treated differently by the states that govern them. What justifies these differences? Thus, the modified categorical principle does not fare all that much better, after all, in helping us think through the question of citizenship’s assignment than either the categorical or the contingent principles.
Having illustrated some of the complexities associated with issues relating to the assignment of citizenship, we will now further complicate this treatment of citizenship by surveying different theories that address the question regarding what ingredients make citizenship. In many ways, this discussion embodies the problems already described: namely, that normativity in the study of citizenship tends to generate understandings of citizenship that pull in one direction, while non-normative formulations pull in another.
Theoretical discussions of the content of citizenship may be divided into two general categories. The first view of the content of citizenship takes citizenship to be defined primarily by rights. (We discuss this idea at greater length in chapter 2.) States grant rights and thus define the expectations of citizens. In so doing, they give substance to the abstract notion of citizenship. This very traditional understanding of state-centric citizenship paints citizenship as a form of membership that determines any individual’s share of the collective resources, where resources are defined broadly as both material and political goods.23 In this view, rights are the mechanism through which goods are distributed, freedoms protected, and voice or representation is guaranteed. Rights are claims made against the state, but they are also claims managed and mediated by the state. In other words, this formulation places a great deal of weight on state institutions to fulfill promises of equality. But these promises would not be fulfilled in any meaningful sense unless the state in question confers something more substantive than mere formal equality to its citizens. Another way of putting this would be to say that, while de jure forms of citizenship, in which laws are written with the understanding that the equality of all members of a society, are important, they have to actually succeed in putting members into politically egalitarian relationships in order for a rights-centric view of citizenship to succeed. In this view, it is not enough to simply have a formal and juridical equality that is devoid of substantive content. As such, facially neutral laws, that appear to be non-discriminatory but nonetheless preserve consequential forms of inequality and disparate impact on disparate social groups, undermine rather than bolster the citizenship of those adversely affected by them. Examples of such false claims to enacting equal citizenship abound. The US Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down laws establishing separate but equal facilities for whites and blacks in the post-Civil War era is a classic case in point of de jure equality that nonetheless masked de facto forms of subordination of black Americans.
A second view locates citizenship’s content in specific forms of political action. Individuals participating in the public sphere define the nature of citizenship through the fulfillment of specific responsibilities.24 In this view, social rights and civil rights are often justified on the grounds that they protect, enable, and encourage political participation.25 This kind of contingency can work in any direction. One could imagine a justification for political rights of representation that predicates them on property rights. In this version of contingency, anyone who does not own property in a place ought not to need political rights. Regardless of which rights are considered contingent on which other rights, functional contingency within the fundamental rights of citizenship tends to reduce citizenship to those goods and acts on which other rights are predicated. Such an understanding of citizenship makes it an inverted pyramid that balances the heavy weight of rights on their connections to a narrow subset of specific acts and goods. Only the tip of that pyramid remains truly fundamental.
Critics of this approach identify at least two kinds of problem. First, they doubt the empirical claim that is central to this understanding of citizenship. To some extent it may hold true that the instantiation or exercise of one right fulfills conditions necessary to exercise another right. However, this relationship need not be central to why a right is included in the pantheon of rights considered fundamental to citizenship. After all, a number of things might enable the exercise a right. We do not go around making everything that helps in the exercise of a right an additional right which the state guarantees. Consider this example: we need roads on which we can travel to polling places. In this sense, one might say that having the ability to get to the polling booth is a right one has and one can demand. But we just do not know where the line lies between a reasonable demand for a right and an unreasonable demand for a right, e.g., a chauffeur and luxury automobile to transport us to a polling place. Observe that both rights are what the political theorist Isaiah Berlin has called positive rights (as in, rights that invite an active intervention of the state) as opposed to negative rights (which are typically understood in terms of non-interference from the state in an individual’s exercise of their liberty). But we just don’t know, in this case, what the threshold is between a reasonable demand for a positive right and an unreasonable demand for a positive right.
Thus we might find relationships among all kinds of rights and privileges but that does not cause us to continually expand the boundaries of citizenship rights. It is also difficult to imagine that any relationship between a right and the corresponding good it produces is universal. Not all people in all contexts provided with the same set of social rights unfailingly become specific types of “good” or “effective” political participants, for example. On the other hand, plenty of people who do not have or exercise the social rights that are assumed to produce higher political participation rates turn out to be good participants, even without having access to those rights.
Second, some moral philosophers lodge convincing arguments that it is not only unrealistic to justify social rights on the basis of civil and political rights, it is also unsustainable because liberty rights cannot and should not be reducible to welfare rights or vice versa.26 In this view, civil and political rights are justified on the basis of the fact that they reduce domination. But they are mostly not positive rights. We are free to speak, but, if a disability prevents us from doing so, the civil right to speech won’t force the state to address our disability on the grounds that it would enable the exercise of free speech rights. Nor would we want this. We would like the state to meet the needs of differently abled citizens because that is an end in and of itself, regardless of the consequences such interventions might produce.
Both as a matter of historical record and via a review of academic arguments, we come to understand that citizenship exists in contrast to an array of other forms of membership including cultural, social, class, and cultural nation membership. We have suggested here that modern citizenship is the product of laws and formal political institutions. Citizenships are legally inscribed rather than just practiced or transmitted through norms. This means citizenship is structural, rather than cultural or material, because it is most immediately and profoundly influenced by structural factors and because it in turn influences those structures.27 We also submit that citizenship is structural – in the sense of being located within a web of political relationships – as a means of distinguishing it from a variety of statuses that bear on citizenship but should not be conflated or confused with citizenship.
For example, citizenship is not coterminous with social and class-based identities even though these identities may refract the ways in which individuals come to experience their citizenship rights in a given context. Social and class-based identities are not, after all, either necessarily or completely enforced by the state. Social identities are the product of social norms, roles, traditions, and relationships. Social classes are produced in networks of ownership and property relationships. Citizenship, on the other hand, is related to political structures that impose a type of power that is both unique and a prerequisite for citizenship’s formation. In the twenty-first century, elite socioeconomic classes have to hijack the apparatus of the state in order to subjugate other citizens, and the extent to which they can do so is limited, even in a context of extreme and rising economic inequality. Nor can or do they rely upon any legal use of violence to do so. The state, as Max Weber has so astutely noted, must monopolize the legal use of violence. Thus citizenship may influence identity, and identity may influence or even determine citizenship in some instances. But citizenship’s political status, in and of itself, has a distinct meaning and power. Here, in adopting this line of thinking, we part company with scholars such as Iris Marion Young. Young notes that identity is often a product of social structures such as social class, race, gender, etc., and not just political structures that derive from the state. From this insight, she and others extrapolate a definition of citizenship that doesn’t carve out a singular role for the state but instead places the state on the same plane as social structures.
The line between citizenship and subjecthood is also often blurred. Citizenship should be understood as a status that differs from subjecthood. The latter is a condition whereby a person’s rights and duties are mediated by that, who, or which has dominion over them and at whose pleasure individual rights are to be enjoyed. The confusion arises partly because citizenship has an ancient imperial lineage via which we see a wide variety of approaches to inclusion, political voice, and rights. While ancient Greek citizenship was exclusionary but highly engaged, membership in the Roman Empire was inclusionary but came with far fewer opportunities for participation.28 Furthermore, while it is the case that subjecthood is most starkly evident under monarchies, it was also imposed by empires on the peoples they colonized. Mahmood Mamdani has shown that not only did western colonial powers, some of which were democracies, impose subjecthood, but the forms of domination that they deployed proved quite durable. For Mamdani, political identities do exist apart from the market-based and cultural identities that receive the lion’s share of academic attention. The political identity of a subject is produced by domination in which a powerful group accords itself rights and forces subject groups to live according to custom.29
Although empire and citizenship are often counterposed as opposites, Mamdani also points out that when colonial powers exited the African countries they had colonized, the remaining populations retained an adherence to the horizontal political identities that are characteristic of empire. Horizontal political identities and vertical race-based distinctions create legal hierarchies out of ethnic and racial identities. So, for example, in Uganda, different indigenous ethnic groups were distinguished, legally, with entirely separate bodies of customary law. Settler races were also distinguished using vertical hierarchies. Indians in East, Central, and South Africa were legally demarcated neither as settler nor as ethnically indigenous. Instead of razing these horizontal strata in favor of egalitarian forms of political membership, many formerly colonized peoples sought to dominate each other, attempting (often successfully) to use forms of authenticity and indigeneity to reproduce the model of subject and citizen they had been accustomed to under colonialism. People deemed indigenous and able to wrest institutional power from others were able to take control of state institutions and subjugate those who were deemed non-indigenous and who could not gain institutional power. In this way, formerly subjugated persons came to wield power over others who in turn became their subjects.
This, then, is the key distinction between subjecthood and citizenship. In practice, the modern citizen is created by efforts to escape the arbitrariness of subjecthood that was imposed on most people by premodern politics. Typically, this story about the genesis of the modern citizen is told via the lens of Enlightenment theorists of rights whose works had a major influence on the American and French Revolutions. In each instance, revolutionaries sought to overthrow kings who ruled by fiat and a landed gentry that refused access to those not in its ranks through birthright membership. But being liberated from dominion always required more than the ousting of aristocracies. Positive law enacting egalitarian access to rights, and the enforcement of that law, is critical. John Stuart Mill makes this point very starkly in On Liberty when he warns of the ways in which democracies that allow majorities to tyrannize minorities are just as worrisome as tyrannical kings.
In addition to being distinct from identity, class, and subjecthood, citizenship is also not interchangeable with the concept of nationality. Attachments to nations, both those that overlap with states and those that do not, create powerful and important identities. Nationality and citizenship can influence one another. But a commitment to precision dictates not using the concepts interchangeably. The distinction between citizenship and nationality has been usefully explored by T. K. Oommen, who has posited that the reason we need the concept of citizenship is to refer to that which nationality cannot fully capture. There are two main usages for nationality. The first is as a proxy for bearing a passport and rights of place associated with a state. We might say that someone’s nationality is conferred at the moment they are claimed by a nation-state when that state offers them a passport and a permanent right to reside in and return to that state. This is primarily a legal status but one that is less capacious than citizenship because citizenship confers more than merely a passport and free-movement rights. Such is the case, for example, with American Samoans, who are US nationals and not US citizens, and who are entitled to US passports but who cannot vote in US federal, state, or local elections. Equally, in casual parlance one might refer to people in possession of the passports of authoritarian states as “citizens” of those states. Yet, upon closer inspection, the political opportunities available to people under authoritarian rule do not appear to rise to the level of citizenship. They have stronger resemblances to nationality, and even subjecthood, than to citizenship.
The second way that nationality is used is as a catch-all for attachments to nations as affective communities. In Ernest Renan’s memorable terms, nations have “soul[s], a spiritual principle.”30 Past and present compose these elements, and their outcome is primarily affective rather than institutional. Nations as distinct from states are communities in which people share language, history, culture, and other norms that allow them to feel connected whether or not they are also under the territorial and administrative jurisdiction of a state. While each of these is a complex and contested case, three examples might be offered here of transnational communities in the contemporary global order that identify as nations; these are: the Islamic umma; Hindu nationalists; and diasporic Jews. In all three of these cases, the members of these nations see themselves as sharing a set of identities. At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, one might describe these three forms of nationalism as such: in Islam, the concept of the umma dictates that all people who belong to the faith share a fraternal relationship with each other; Jews around the world represent a transnational community that, despite quite a bit of internal diversity, nonetheless share with each other, at the very least, a common history that dates back to antiquity; and Hindu nationalists too claim, at the very least, a shared history dating back to antiquity.‡ Observe, however, that members of none of these nations necessarily identify their citizenship statuses with the nations to which they belong and each requires some form of citizenship in addition to the nationalities of which they are a part.