citizenship: Definition from Answers.com
- ️Thu Aug 09 2007
The concept of citizenship was at the heart of the Constitution. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," he drew upon the writings of the ancient Greeks Solon (circa 640–559 B.C.) and Pericles (490–429 B.C.) who had argued that the state has legitimacy only so far as it governs in the best interest of its citizens.
Jefferson argued that citizens were autonomous beings whose individual needs had value, and he said that governments that interfered with the fulfillment of those needs—"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"—were tyrannical and unjust. By "all men," he meant every human being. That Jefferson continued to own slaves shows a profound weakness in his character, but men and women of many ethnic backgrounds understood his words to apply to them, and the ideals of Jefferson were the intellectual foundation upon which many revolutions would follow.
In America, those ideals encouraged abolitionists and suffragettes. When the Constitution was written, its authors were well aware of the ideals that had motivated Americans to fight for their freedom from England. They carefully began the Constitution with a radical, defiant idea. "We the People" is the opening phrase, and it is presented as if it were a decree. In a monarchical society, the monarch would refer to himself or herself as "we," because he or she believed as Louis XIV put it, "I am the state." In a monarchy, power flows down from the top: a person's power stems from his or her relationship to the monarch, and a person has only as many rights and duties as the monarch should choose to give. In "We the People," this is reversed; the power of the new American government is to flow upward, not downward, and the powers of those who govern are to be only as great as the citizens should choose to give.
What constitutes a citizen became a matter of urgent debate because equality and freedom were tied to citizen-ship. Article I of the Constitution made three references to citizenship, in Sections 2, 3, and 8 (clause 4), governing the House of Representatives, the Senate, and naturalization. Representatives had to have been citizens for seven years and senators for nine years; the U.S. Congress had the power to set the rules for naturalizing citizens. Missing is a definition of citizen, an important point because the representatives in the House were to be apportioned throughout the United States primarily on the basis of population. It was understood that this included free women and children, but did it include slaves? If it did, would the slaves therefore be citizens entitled to the liberties of the Constitution? For the time being, the slaves were not to be counted.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution declared that to be president (and therefore vice president, too), a "person" must be "a natural-born citizen" and must have "been fourteen years a resident within the United States." The purpose of this was to make illegal the imposing of a foreign ruler on the nation, but it left in doubt what "natural-born" meant, although it customarily was interpreted to mean born within the borders of the United States or born within the borders of the colonies that became the United States.
It was Article IV that would form the basis of the lawsuit Dred Scott v. Sandford that resulted in the infamous Supreme Court ruling of 1857. In Section 2, the constitution declares "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." Yet, the matter of who was a citizen was left to the individual state. Thomas Jefferson argued in the vein of Solon that only by being able to vote in the election of leaders is a person truly a citizen, and he argued that being able to vote was both a right and an obligation for every free person; he believed everyone who met the minimum age requirement should be able to vote. John Adams disagreed; he argued that only people who owned property had enough interest in maintaining a just and stable government and that only they should be allowed to vote. This latter idea implied two tiers of citizenship: one with all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and one with only limited rights and responsibilities that could change by a person's purchasing land. When the Bill of Rights was passed, it was intended to apply to all citizens, landed or not, but many understood the Bill of Rights applied only to property-owning citizens and no others, even foreign nationals who had resided in the United States for many years.
The Matters of Slaves and Women's Citizenship
Jefferson's view slowly supplanted Adams's view, but out of the Constitution emerged at least two explosive disagreements over who merited citizenship. One was over the status of women; the other was over the status of African Americans. After the adoption of the Constitution, there was an erosion of the civil rights of women throughout the country. In those states where women had once been able to hold public office or even vote, women were denied access to polling places. In general, women were held to have rights only through their relationship to husbands or close male kin. This sparked a branching in the abolitionist movement, as women abolitionists tied liberty for slaves to civil rights for women.
In 1857, the Supreme Court heard the appeal of the case of the slave Dred Scott, a slave who had filed suit claiming that when his master took him to a free state while in that state he should be a free man because that state forbade slavery. The court ruled that "negroes of the African race" whose ancestors were "imported into this country, and sold and held as slaves" were not "people" as the word was used in the Constitution, and they could not have citizenship and therefore they did not have even the right to file a lawsuit in the first place. This ruling actually contradicted the idea of "states' rights" as it was understood at the time, but the decision was a political one, not a constitutional one, and was intended to avoid the potential for civil strife between free states and slave states.
President Abraham Lincoln brought to office a view of citizenship born out of his upbringing on the frontier. He saw citizenship as a means for even the poorest Americans to seek redress of wrongs and to have access to education and other sources of social mobility. He summarized this in his Gettysburg Address, in which he said the government of the United States was "of the people, by the people, and for the people." It was his view that the government had no legitimacy beyond what the people gave it, yet in "for the people" he meant that the government was obliged to actively help its people in attaining their civil rights.
His supporters in Congress were called the "Radical Republicans" because they wanted to reshape America's institutions to reflect fully the sovereignty of the individual human being; to them "people" applied to every human being. Thus they sought the abolition of slavery, and most hoped to follow the emancipation of all slaves with the full enfranchisement of women because only by receiving the full protection of the Constitution, including the vote, could women attain a government that represented them; otherwise, according to Lincoln, Jefferson, and even Solon, the government would be tyranny. The Democrats, who had opposed the freeing of slaves, bitterly opposed changing the constitutional status of women.
The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to clarify the nature of American citizenship. For instance, it tried to explain what a "natural-born citizen" was and how to determine it. Its broadest and most important innovation was the assertion of the federal government's authority over every state in all matters pertaining to citizenship. It declared that any citizen of the United States was automatically a citizen in any state in which that person resided, even if that person moved from state to state. It declared that in counting people for representation in the House of Representatives, every human being was to be included except for "Indians not taxed," which meant those Native Americans who retained their native nationality rather than assimilating into American society.
Best known from the amendment is "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The amendment was ratified 9 July 1868. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lawsuits have been filed on the basis of the amendment, but court rulings have had a checkered history. Although the amendment uses the word "person" throughout, women were still denied the right to vote and were denied full protection under the law in business and family dealings. When the issue of segregating African Americans from other Americans first came before the Supreme Court, it ruled that "separate but equal" was not a violation of equal protection under the law.
The Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution says, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." This was ratified 18 August 1920. If, in light of the Fourteenth Amendment, women were in fact already citizens, this amendment would seem unnecessary, but the earlier amendment had been turned on its head, as if it meant that those states in which women had full citizenship rights did not have the federal rights unless the federal government said so. With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women, by being able to vote, were to take on the full obligations and rights of citizenship and were no longer to be regarded as half persons, half nonentities.
Some Twentieth-Century Consequences
In 1954, the full effect of the Fourteenth Amendment began to be realized. In the case of Brown v. the Board of Education, the Supreme court ruled that separation of people based on race was inherently unequal, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. This began a series of rulings in federal courts that redefined citizenship as a human right not to be abrogated by government, resulting in the 1971 ruling in Rogers v. Bellei that declared the government could not take citizenship from any American citizen except as allowed by the Fourteenth Amendment (treason) or if the citizen were a naturalized citizen who had lied to gain entry to the United States or gain citizenship. Those people who renounced American citizen-ship did not have a right to get it back.
Bibliography
Aleinikoff, Thomas Alexander. Semblance of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bates, Stephen. "Reinvigorating Citizenship." Society 36, no. 3 (March–April 1999): 80–85.
Clarke, Paul Barry, ed. Citizenship. Boulder, Colo.: Pluto Press, 1994.
Denvir, John. Democracy's Constitution: Claiming the Privileges of American Citizenship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Preiss, Byron, and David Osterlund, editors. The Constitution of the United States of America: The Bicentennial Keepsake Edition. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.
—Kirk H. Beetz
In the modern world, citizenship is a legal status that bestows uniform rights and duties upon all members of a state. Modern citizenship is associated with equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary rule, and a basic sense of human dignity bound up with the idea of human rights. It is a powerful term that evokes not only the rights that citizens may claim, but also the duties to which they are called, including dying for one's country. In early modern Europe, the status of citizen was far feebler and more varied in nature. At the dawn of this period, there were no centralized national states, and the vast majority of the population were servile peasants who lived under the rule of a local lord. The idea of citizenship, that is, a body of free people bound by a common law, was restricted to those who enjoyed full rights of membership in privileged towns, the burghers or bourgeois. There was no concept of universal rights of citizens. Rights took the form of privileges that were legitimated by tradition and distributed inequitably according to place, rank, and membership in other corporate bodies—guilds, parliaments, universities, and the like. Urban citizenship was thus just one form of juridical status that coexisted alongside a wide array of corporate groups entitling members to rights and privileges.
Rights and Responsibilities
In general, the citizenship of towns offered several kinds of benefits. Only citizens could hold municipal office and perhaps engage in lucrative urban trades. They enjoyed the privilege of being tried in a local court by their peers and were usually entitled to reduced taxes. Citizenship was commonly restricted to the propertied elite. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Geneva, for example, was divided into an inner core of "citizens" and "bourgeois" who exercised full urban rights, and a wider tier of "inhabitants" and "natives," who had the right to live in the city but not to participate in the most profitable professions or hold municipal office.
The actual type and worth of rights conferred by urban citizenship varied by town. In Zurich and London citizenship was not prerequisite for access to the guilds. In fact, guild membership could be a way to acquire citizenship. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, it was not uncommon for members of the city council to register for citizenship just before taking office. In some cases, acquisition of citizenship was turned into a routine commercial transaction. In theory, the laws of sixteenth-century Bologna made it difficult for naturalized citizens to hold municipal office. In reality, citizens selected for office frequently designated a substitute to fill the post, a practice that amounted to a form of office selling. Nonetheless, urban citizenship might offer important advantages to its members. Citizens of Antwerp (poorters), for example, could not be arrested without cause and were exempt from torture. This was of little concern until the 1540s when the number of registrations for citizenship in Antwerp suddenly jumped. At that time, the town council began to use Antwerp's citizenship rights to protect persecuted Protestants.
Citizenship entailed responsibilities as well as rights. Citizens might be required to serve in the urban militia and to pay local taxes supporting the cost of communal self-government and fortifications. The status of citizen was usually inherited, but it could also be acquired by foreigners. Usually, naturalization required establishing a residence within the city for an extended period of time, paying specified taxes, and taking on other obligations of urban membership. Frequently, citizenship was associated with social and moral qualities. Many central European cities refused citizenship to adulterers and bastards.
Citizenship first became the object of more systematic theoretical reflection in self-governing Italian city-states during the early Renaissance. The recovery of Aristotle and other classical authors, combined with the struggle of Italian city-states to assert their independence from emperors and foreign invaders, stimulated thinkers to clarify the basis of political community. One important strand drew on the work of Bartolus of Sassoferato and his pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis, the most influential jurists working in the Roman law tradition. They provided the first philosophical foundation for viewing the city-state as a fully independent, self-governing corporation of citizens.
A second important tradition drew on Florentine civic humanism. Humanists argued that the best form of government was elective, not monarchical, since elected rulers would best work to achieve the goals of the republic: to attain glory, sustain liberty, and preserve the common good. The civic humanist tradition culminated in the Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in a period of tumult following the French invasion of Italy in 1494. Looking back to the tradition of the Roman Republic, Machiavelli urged his fellow citizens to prevent decline by practicing virtù. For Machiavelli, virtù meant the patriotic love of the republic that led citizens to place the welfare of the political community above individual interests. Good laws and institutions were also necessary to sustain virtù. Among the latter, the most important were civil religion to foster a spirit of unity and a citizen militia to encourage a spirit of self-sacrifice and bravery.
Natives and Foreigners
Given its classical, urban, and corporate roots, citizenship was not easily transferred to monarchical realms, where the king reputedly embodied the state and where vast aristocratic patron-client systems created webs of political obligation. A rudimentary idea of citizenship did distinguish native-born subjects of kingdoms (known as denizens in England, regnicoles in France, and naturales in Spain) from foreigners, who suffered various kinds of disabilities. In Spain, only naturales of the five kingdoms of Aragón could hold offices in their respective kingdoms, engage in transatlantic commerce, or emigrate to the New World. In England, aliens could not vote in parliamentary elections, hold real property, own a British ship, or engage in the profitable colonial trade. In France, foreigners or aubains (a term originally applied to outsiders moving into the jurisdiction of a feudal lord) paid special taxes, and the king could seize their property upon death. Naturalization removed these disabilities. Naturalization might require proof of assimilation into the national culture, as was the case in Spain, or merely be a routine bureaucratic procedure. In France, one had to do little more than offer evidence of Catholicity and French residence and pay the necessary fees. In England, aliens could apply to Parliament for a private naturalization act, a route that was generally closed to Jews, Catholics, and Dissenters. A lesser status of "free denizen," which bestowed the right to participate in the colonial trade, could be purchased by those groups, but it did not grant exemption from steep alien custom duties.
In most cases, the status of a woman, whether at the municipal or national level, followed that of her husband. At times, however, foreign women married to foreign men seeking naturalization were required to be naturalized independently of their husbands. Because women generally could not hold office or practice lucrative trades, naturalization was of less worth to them than to men. Citizenship for women tended to remain a passive status that granted basic judicial protections, but did not authorize vital rights of political participation. Later, during the French Revolution, the secondary status of women was reconfirmed by the overt creation of "active" and "passive" categories of citizenship.
Throughout the early modern period, the quest for religious freedom and the evolution of citizenship remained closely tied. In the medieval world, the political community was also a closed community of Christian believers. Jews were outsiders, frequently banished, and allowed residence in certain countries only if they lived in specified locales, wore distinctive dress, paid special taxes, and the like. With the Reformation, Christian unity was shattered and states were "confessionalized," so that the enjoyment of civil and political rights became tied to membership in the established church of the realm. Religious dissenters might be prohibited from holding office, bequeathing property, joining guilds, obtaining an education, marrying, bringing up their own children, and receiving a Christian burial. In certain cases, toleration was granted as a concession from the ruler or in limited form, such as the right to private worship. Freedom of religion as a universal right of citizenship, however, was only conceptualized after natural law theory offered a nondoctrinal way of legitimating membership in the state.
From Absolute Monarchy to Enlightenment
The period of religious revolt in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was critical to the rise of absolutist citizenship. Rebellious subjects invoked rights of the "ancient constitution" against absolute monarchs, or cited resistance theories that vested sovereignty in the ambiguous notion of "the people." The bloodshed of the period led royal theorists to define the citizen as a subject who owed unquestioned obedience to the sovereign in return for protection. In his Six Books of the Commonwealth, Jean Bodin stated that the citizen was "a free subject who is dependent on the sovereignty of another" (p. 19). Approximately a century later, in De Cive, or, The Citizen (1642), Thomas Hobbes presented a contractual theory of political society in which men voluntarily gave up the natural rights that they enjoyed in the bellicose state of nature to a ruler or ruling body in order to gain security: ". . . each citizen is called the subject of him who hath the chief command" (p. 68).
Despite Hobbes's theorizing, subjects showed themselves determined to hold onto historic rights. After James II was ousted from the English throne during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a Bill of Rights declared that hierarchically ordered "estates" would be maintained in their "ancient rights and liberties." At the same time, John Locke's Second Treatise on Government pointed the way toward a far more radical interpretation of rights as abstract, natural, and universal in scope. For Locke, rights were "inalienable," derived from a free and egalitarian state of nature. Governments were not products of dynastic inheritance or divine will: they were artificial creations grounded in popular consent whose central purpose was to secure citizens' rights. Popularized through tracts such as Cato's Letters, a Lockean conception of rights ultimately became one of the major foundations of the American Declaration of Independence.
By the eighteenth century, then, the usage of the word "citizen" had begun to shed its absolutist association with "subject" and break free from the idea of graded ranks and historically conditioned privileges. This transformation was part of a wider linguistic shift. Words connoting a vertical ordering of society organized by notions of deference and command were abandoned or took on new meaning. The word "king" became uncoupled from "nation," which he had previously embodied. The word "society" no longer meant a business partnership, but a universal field of human relations. Social gradations still existed, but they were often described as classes, which implied productivity and individual effort, rather than as estates, orders, or corps, which suggested a preexisting, divinely sanctioned hierarchy. In the article "Citizen" in his Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot defined the citizen not in terms of participation in the privileges of a city, but as "a member of a free society . . . who partakes of the rights of that society and enjoys its privileges."
Two moral qualities were particularly associated with the citizen: utility and virtue. Political economists spread the idea that the most powerful state was the one that counted the greatest number of "industrious" men. The pursuit of plenty, according to these thinkers, was not something to be scorned for its corruption of civic spirit, but to be praised for its ability to unleash national productive power. Utility did not necessarily negate hierarchy, but it did shift the justification for social ranks from innate qualities, like noble birth, to functional attributes available to any hardworking person.
Virtue continued to be defined by reference to classical republican qualities. In his Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu spoke of virtue in terms of "the love of our country, of the thirst of true glory, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of our dearest interests, and of all those heroic virtues which we admire in the ancients" (Vol. I, Bk. III.5, p. 23). Yet virtue also acquired enlightened overtones of sociability and humanitarianism. Rousseau spoke of virtue not only in terms of patriotic self-sacrifice, but also of sensibility and pity revealed through the inner voice of the conscience. For Rousseau and others, virtue was a humanitarian sentiment most easily found among the common people. By imparting moral worth to ordinary people, virtue legitimated their quest to gain a political voice.
Many rejected the ideals of classical republicanism as a model for citizenship altogether. The direct democracy suitable to small, face-to-face societies like the ancient republics would not work in large, culturally diffuse states. Furthermore, too much popular participation had opened up ancient republics to constant factionalism. Rather than relying on direct democracy, men like Jean Louis de Lolme argued, it would be better to set up a passive system of representation and create institutional checks and balances to channel the interests of the people toward the common good. Ancient republics, furthermore, had practiced slavery, denigrated women and domestic life, spurned commercial development, and even permitted infanticide. Republican citizenship would have to be made compatible with the technological progress, commercial prosperity, and humane virtues that most enlightened elites endorsed.
The Social Contract
By the end of the eighteenth century, then, two visions of republican citizenship had emerged. One, often labeled "liberal," was derived from a natural law tradition and emphasized the rights of individuals, representation, and material progress. It was concerned with checking arbitrary power and securing the conditions that would allow men and women to enjoy the fruits of their labor in peace. A second, more activist and communal strand inspired by classical republicanism appealed to civic virtues of self-sacrifice, public-spiritedness, and the constant vigilance of citizens against enemies of freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought elements of both traditions together in The Social Contract, a treatise meant to serve as an ideal, not an actual blueprint, for society. According to Rousseau, men in their natural state were free and equal, but they were also amoral and governed by instinct. Men reached their full human potential only through the exercise of citizenship. In the social contract, each individual gave up his powers from the state of nature to everyone else in order to form a state. The essence of citizenship, then, was participation in the social contract, which created a state of morality, civil freedom, equality, and democratic participation. Citizens were bound by law, but remained free, because they imposed laws on themselves. Citizens were equal before the law, because everyone came into the social contract under the same terms. The public interest or "general will" served as the ultimate source of law, because all individuals had sacrificed their private interests to become part of the state. For Rousseau, citizenship was a legal status, but not a passive one, as it implied moral duties and active participation.
The actual transition to a new form of citizenship stemmed from the practical need to make states more competitive in war. In France the monarchy contributed to a more egalitarian definition of society by attempting to tax privileged members of society. Royal reforming ministers and their allies argued that payment of taxes defined citizenship, because all members of society, even the privileged, owed the state taxes in return for protection. As the Physiocrat writer Le Trosne declared in his work on tax reform, ecclesiastical tax exemptions put the clergy "outside the class of citizens" and stripped them "of all right to civil protection" (p. 501). In reply, the most powerful corporate bodies in France, the sovereign courts known as parlements, stretched corporate politics to the breaking point and went beyond their traditional defense of "fundamental laws." Claiming to speak for "the Nation," the parlements stated that the nation had a right to consent to taxes and thereby made themselves virtual co-sovereigns with the king.
The bankruptcy of the French government in 1788 proved that a new organization of the state was necessary. Drawing on political economy and social contract theory, the Abbé Sieyès in What Is the Third Estate? laid out the terms of modern citizenship as a national, egalitarian, and utilitarian status. Citizens were members of the nation, that is, "a body of associates living under common laws" (p. 55). Since privileges were exemptions from the common law, all those who enjoyed privileges, notably the nobility, were noncitizens. Eventually, this logic was used to justify the execution of the king, since an absolute monarch stood outside the common law formed by the social contract and thus could be judged, as Saint Just argued in 1792, "not as a citizen, but as a rebel" (p. 123). Enshrined in "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" of 1789, citizenship became synonymous with both the enjoyment of fundamental rights and a new vision of national sovereignty. Rather than being one legal status among many in a corporate society, citizenship had become the primary status mediating all other juridical relationships in the state and the primary marker of human worth.
Bibliography
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—GAIL BOSSENGA