The commander went to Paul and asked, ‘Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?’
‘Yes, I am,’ he answered.
Then the commander said, ‘I had to pay a lot of money for my citizenship.’
‘But I was born a citizen,’ Paul replied.
Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realised that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.
Acts 22:27–29.
‘… [the] voice and supplication, ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ […] has often brought help and safety to many in the remotest lands among the barbarians’ — Cicero, In Verrem 2.5
‘He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state; and, speaking generally, a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.’ — Aristotle, Politics, Book III
Citizenship evolved in ancient Athens from an obligation to discharge judicial and administrative duties and became, in ancient Rome, a declaration of pride and of legal impunity. In AD 212, Caracalla granted citizenship to all free men of the expanding Roman Empire. While for Aristotle citizenship is an ideal defined by the exclusion of non-citizens—slaves, aliens, women—the Romans charted a different course, a course whose value Niccolò Machiavelli incisively understood. Looking back at the flowering of Roman civic virtue, he asserted that Rome rose to heights Athens could never touch precisely because it made citizenship an inclusive, aspirational ideal (Disc. II, iii).
Thus, while presaging the inception of the modern nation-state, Machiavelli turned to the Roman model, with the citizen as a bearer of constitutional rights and dispenser of political, economic, and military duties (Discourses). But the Machiavellian moment also marks a return to ‘the age of princes’. Belonging to a polity was construed largely as subjection to a divinely ordained sovereign’s authority within a given territory. In these kingdoms, legal rights were often tied to property ownership, creating a hierarchical, feudal structure of subjection.
With the advent of representative democracy and technologies of modern transport, belonging became linked to the right to exercise the franchise and a labyrinth of rules pertaining to immigration and travel permits. The enmeshing of rights and duties in the figure of the citizen is radically modified in modern democracies. Max Weber, arguing in the middle of the Great War in favour of equal suffrage rights in Germany, says the right to cast a ballot is the only adequate compensation for the obligation to die on the battlefield for one’s nation (Suffrage and Democracy, 1917). The colonial encounters with ‘primitive’ polities also led to a rather un-Roman restriction of the notion of citizenship. For Weber, membership of the modern nation-state is ‘a modern and western concept’ from which the Islamic, Indian, and Chinese worlds are emphatically excluded (GEH, ch. XXVIII).
In the 21st century, a record 117 million people have already been forcibly displaced and compelled to seek membership of other polities. The privileges, duties, and eligibility associated with belonging to a state have emerged as some of the most fraught issues of our time. The US executive is striving to outlaw birthright citizenship, deporting inhabitants by the truckload; and in India, neither a passport nor a voter’s card is currently considered absolute proof of citizenship, leading to an absurd legal limbo which enables the state to incarcerate inhabitants in detention camps or arbitrarily dump them into the territories of hostile neighbours.
What guarantees our membership of nation-states? Is it inclusion in census rolls, participation in government, payment of taxes, the right to free movement and domicile, ownership of property, or passing the Tebbit test? Is citizenship indeed an exclusively ‘Western’ ideal? What are the marks of belonging and legitimacy beyond the arcana of documentary evidence? Our new series on Citizenship and Belonging proposes a historical and philosophical enquiry into the concepts of citizenship, subjecthood, and immigration, engaging simultaneously with the theoretical and the empirical, the European and the ‘other’, the contemporary and the historical.