Citizen Centered: What is a citizen?
- Nathan Tupper
- Aug 17
- 10 min read
The Need to Define Citizen
It is easy to tell that in the past decade and a half that the meaning of citizenship as used in the American context has been put to question. Exemplified very well by the moves of people in our current authority to deem anybody who needs to prove their citizenship to be dubious. What makes these people less of a citizen? Is it simply because they have not taken a test? That a judge has not yet told them that they are? That they are not born with a specific skin color? That they do not adhere to a specific belief system? History has varying answers to these questions, but I would like to invest time into what a Citizen Centered version of citizenship is, along with inspirations that inform what we should view as citizenship.
Historical Inspirations
Neolithic Citizenship
Starting from the earliest inspirations and building off of them, we can look to ancient ideas of what it meant to be a “citizen”. Officially, in ancient times the idea of citizenship was never outright defined, however tribe or clan association was perhaps the closest we could get to a similar idea.
I am no sociologist or anthropologist, just a political scientist, but as far as I can tell the tribe came out of the need for stability as humanity came out of the neolithic era. It gave humanity a “reason” other than material conditions to buy into the idea that we should help the people around us so that they can help us in turn. Patrica Cone’s “The Tribe and the State” gives qualifications for how Mesopotamian peoples lived as their tribes. She defines the word “is best defined as a decent group (occasionally several) which constitutes a political community” (pg 447). Simple enough right? Not quite.
Renowned anthropologist Marshall Sahlins generally speaks to a few points on ancient societies that can give us insight on modern citizenship. He invites us to reflect on the relationship between economics, biology, and the cultures that tribes and later on fully fledged societies came about from those tribal structures. Much of the nuances of these come to a “chicken and egg” problem, especially when examining the role of biology in cultural evolution, but for this essay it is worth noting that there is debate if biology informed culture, or if humans perceived biological functions was informed by the cultures they were raised in. Sahlins is starkly anti-biological determinist which I am as well, so I buy into the idea that culture is informative of how we, even as modern humans, perceive biology. That is of course not to say there is no such thing as biological fact, simply that what humans do with those facts are informed by the cultures, and sometimes even the economies, we are raised in.
Athens and Rome
Later forms of citizenship in the ancient eras that are worthy of note are those from Roman republicanism and Athenian democracy. These forms of thought are already heavily emphasized in modern thought because of how much the US constitution borrows from those societies, but it is still worth discussing here because of how far we have changed from them. Athenian citizenship was always flexible because of the pitfalls of direct democracy, but in general it simply related to the fact that a citizen was: born male, was not a slave, was an adult, and had completed a time of military service. Explicitly excluded were: slaves, freed slaves, children, women of all ages, and foreigners residing in the city-state. Citizenship then, was not seen in the same light as it is today. It is closer to how the founders saw it in the original forming of the constitution, but even our founders were more open with the rights to vote than ancient Athenians were given that they did not require men to serve in the military to be able to vote. Athenian democracy can be almost seen as a form of ethnic-democracy, where the granted rights and privileges of the state are only given to those of the right blood and sex, but the rights given to those of the “correct” blood and sex are extensive and meant to encourage participation in the general society. A notable right given to these citizens is that they are protected from being enslaved from anyone. Importantly however for a Citizen Centered view on citizenship, the title of citizen is given to the descendants of parent citizens. Sometimes the definition was changed between one or two parents needing to be Athenian, but the idea stood throughout Athenian democracy that anyone born to an Athenian is a citizen by birthright.
Roman citizenship is much more complicated given the larger history that Rome lasted, but I will do my best to keep things to the point. Roman citizens could be born to two already Roman citizen parents (noting that women could be citizens). If someone was not born to Roman parents, they could complete a public service, notably in the military, and entire cities could attain citizenship for themselves through implementing Latin law. The Wikipedia for Roman citizenship includes a list of differing tiers and types of citizenship that readers are free to explore themselves, but this is outside the scope of this essay. What is notable however, is the degree to which Roman law sought to strike a balance of encouraging participation in Roman political society as well the adherence to traditions set out in Roman mythologies that prescribe Roman lifestyles. The reasons for this are mostly to do with administrating the vast lands that Rome ruled over and less to do with modern enlightenment, but the thought is still nice.
The French Revolution
The next inspiration of citizenship for the Citizen centered idea is the French Revolution, which in all reality, came up with the idea of the modern “citizen” as a grounded political idea. For this section I will be using Rogers Brubaker’s essay The French Revolution and the Invention of Citizenship to describe what the French Revolution had to say about citizenship. This is where we see the buildup to a looser form of citizenship that is close to what we see today: “By the eighteenth century, domicile was still necessary;
but in addition to domicile, either of the first two criteria established one's French citizenship: it was enough to have been born in France, or to have been born of French parents.” French citizenship also included the idea of equality before the law, as opposed to Roman tiered forms of citizenship. As quoted in the essay by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes:
This form of equality had some roots in ancient theory but is more likely borne out of the French Revolution’s contemporary Enlightenment thought. The same enlightenment that gave the American Revolution and other revolutions of their day the similar drive to throw off foreign colonizers and oppressors in favor of rule of law and the endorsing of similar forms of citizenship in their own countries.
Brubaker also states that the Revolution creates a democratic form of citizenship. That is most apparent given the writers of the Revolution, quoting Rousseau in the Social Contract “houses make the town (ville) but . . . citizens make the civic body (cité).” This is to note that the attitude that a citizen should have is a participatory one. Not simply living in the country, but actively engaged with the events of the state to be informed on what they should do with their rights. In a sense, there is a responsibility of the citizens of a country to be members of not only their immediate tribe, but also of their nation as a whole.
After this Brubaker notes how the usage of the word citizen was also used to distance the foreigner or supposed enemy of the state from the body of people in France (whether actual foreigner or not). This artificial distancing obfuscated and confused the meaning of citizen towards political ends for the leaders of the revolution to their own ends, but in a practical sense for the non-citizen removed them from the rights of man that the revolution seems to uphold for everyone else.
Brubaker ends his essay by summarizing the French Revolution as the movement that removed old forms of tiered, aristocratic and hierarchical forms of rights and privileges to the kind of new civic union that emphasizes the equality of all within the body politic for good or worse ends. He describes it on page 45 as a “state-building and state-strengthening revolution” through simplifying rights and privileges afforded by the state to all equally.
In summary of the French Revolution then, we see a form of citizenship that is equal to all others by law, actively engaging with their community no matter the size, and concerned with the safety of their nation, even to a fault.
American Citizenship
Lastly, we will look to the US Constitution and some American history to examine what being an American citizen looks like. The USCIS website includes a helpful link for anyone wanting to naturalize in the United States! You are required to fill out a Form N-400, a 14 page document that determines your eligibility. Per the 14 Amendment, there is a section of the document that states that someone will not likely need to fill out this form if they were born in the US or if either of their parents were born in the US. I have hyper-linked the pdf itself in case anyone wants to look at this themselves, but to say the least it is quite the process that I cannot imagine having to do while ICE is breathing down my neck. In essence, a person may already be a resident of the United States, work in the United States, vote in the United States (depending on state law), pay taxes and levies to the United States, go to school in the United States for a number of years, and much more without being a citizen.
As stated before, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution gives provisions for birthright citizenship. However, there is much more to it than simply that. Section one of the Amendment says:
For those of you following the links, notice the date this was ratified. July 9th, 1868. This was ratified two years after the Civil War when Confederate vigilante revenge was at its height through groups like the Klu Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts. Of all points in American history, that time would be the most important to define who is a citizen of our nation.
Liberal-Individualism and Civic-Republicanism
After reading all these types of citizens, we come to two terms that define what kind of thing a citizen is. The liberal-individualist (liberal) type and the civic-republican (civic) type. I will shorten these to liberal and civic for brevity. Liberal citizenry is the type that simply states a legal status of what a citizen’s rights and privileges are. It describes the freedoms that citizens have. The civic form of citizenry describes the role that citizens have in the frame of reference of the state. Civic citizenry is a form of civic responsibility that a person has for the greater community.
Citizen Centered philosophy finds no distinction in these forms of citizenry but rather looks for a synthesis between the two. Citizens have rights and responsibilities. The current US definition leans to the liberal side of citizenry but is vacuous on any responsibilities that citizens have beside paying taxes and forcing boys to sign up for the Selective Service when they turn 18. This simply is not enough for what modern democracy demands of the world and the populations that express sovereignty through their state. Current US policy also leaves those who are not citizens in a nebulous state, where their status in the country is not really a violation unless they overstay their visa in which they need to renew it much like a citizen would renew their driver's license. Immigrants, even illegal immigrants, pay taxes and levies to the government while still receiving fewer compensations than citizens do, regardless of the fact that they commit less crime than the average American does. There must then be a way to value these people’s efforts for the country despite their citizenship status, since they seem to act like any other citizen.
Policies such as:
proportional representation in legislatures,
holidays for all voting days,
national referenda,
lobbying restrictions,
insider trading outlaws,
jury nullification,
the freedom of the press and speech,
anti-trust laws,
anti-discrimination laws,
center government policy around the citizens, their rights and responsibilities. These kinds of policies enable citizens to enact their civic duties to the state by giving them the chance to do so outside the pressures of their job's daily demands, the culture they were raised in, and discrimination against someone's creed. They allow the individual citizen to invest the time needed to be informed on topics they may not be otherwise; they keep legislatures in check through referenda and through their popular mandate. These are easily seen to be inspired by historical precedent but are policies often ignored because it forces those in power to act selflessly for the good of their country and thus run contrary to their interest of maintaining power.
The policies I mentioned have their own pros and cons that can be debated on their own merits, but it cannot be denied that those are the kinds of policies that force the people to be responsible with the civic duties in a way that our current system in the United States simply does not allow.
References:
1: Sahlins, Marshall (2017). Stone Age Economics. Routledge. p. 2. ISBN 9781138702615.
2: Lape, Susan (2010). Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-67676-5. OCLC 798549142.
3: Martin, Jochen (1995). "The Roman Empire: Domination and Integration". Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft. 151 (4): 714–724.
4: Brubaker, W. R. (1989). The French Revolution and the Invention of Citizenship. French Politics and Society, 7(3), 30–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42844105
5: 1 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? , trans. M. Blondel,
ed. S.E. Finer (New York : Praeger, 1963), p. 162.
6: Amendments 11 - 27 – National Center for Constitutional Studies
7: Rodrigue, John C. (2001). Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-8071-5263-8.
8: LIGHT, M.T. and MILLER, T. (2018), DOES UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION INCREASE VIOLENT CRIME?*. Criminology, 56: 370-401. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12175
Graif C, Sampson RJ. Spatial Heterogeneity in the Effects of Immigration and Diversity on Neighborhood Homicide Rates. Homicide Stud. 2009 Jul 15;13(3):242-260. doi: 10.1177/1088767909336728. PMID: 20671811; PMCID: PMC2911240.
Green, D. (2016), The Trump Hypothesis: Testing Immigrant Populations as a Determinant of Violent and Drug-Related Crime in the United States*. Social Science Quarterly, 97: 506-524. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12300
Lesley Williams Reid, Harald E. Weiss, Robert M. Adelman, Charles Jaret, The immigration–crime relationship: Evidence across US metropolitan areas, Social Science Research, Volume 34, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 757-780, ISSN 0049-089X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.01.001.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w31440.pdf