Citizenship

Normative theorizing about citizenship has been dominated by three different models—the republican, the legal, and the liberal democratic—reflecting respectively the civic experiences of city republics, empires, and nation-states. The first two originated in ancient Greece and Rome. These provided the classical models of citizenship not only by belonging to the “classical” period of history but also in setting the terms of much later debate. The key contemporary debate surrounds whether we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth, cosmopolitan, model of citizenship appropriate to a global age, and how far it departs from these earlier three. Aristotle's Politics provides the canonical text of the Greek version of republican citizenship, with ancient Athens as the model. Legal citizenship has private interests and their protection at its heart. The sociologists T. H. Marshall and Stein Rokkan established what has become the standard narrative of the evolution of modern democratic citizenship. This article also discusses liberal democratic citizenship and cosmopolitan citizenship.