2 The meanings of

citizenship: from status to

social process

Carine Bachmann & Christian Staerklé

“A polis or a state belongs to the order of ‘compounds’, in the same way as

all other things which form a single ‘whole’, but a ‘whole’ composed, none
the less, of a number of different parts. This being the case, it clearly
follows that we must inquire into the nature of the citizen (i.e. the parts)
before inquiring into the nature of the state (i.e. the whole composed of such
parts). In other words, a state is a compound made up of citizens; and this
compels us to consider who should properly be called a citizen and what a
citizen really is.”

Aristotle, The Politics, originally written ca. 335 BC, cited in Blaug, R. &
Schwarzmantel, J. , 2000, 208.

Who are the citizens and what does it mean to be a member of a political
community? As the extract from Aristotle makes clear, the questions about the definition,
meanings and roles of citizens have been debated ever since the time of the Greek polis.
Citizenship is not a clear-cut and stable analytical concept; it has been constantly modified
in political practices and accommodated to changing historical situations. In order to grasp
what citizenship has become to mean in the contemporary world, it may be helpful to begin
by identifying where the concept comes from and how its meaning has changed over time.

2.1 The origin and historical evolution of citizenship

The word ‘citizen’ derives from the Latin civis or civitas, meaning a member of an
ancient city-state, preeminently the Roman republic. But civitas was a Latin rendering of
the Greek term polites, a member of a Greek polis. The polites or citizen as defined by
Aristotle was as a person who, by living in the city, participated in a process of cultivation,
someone who rules and is ruled in turn. Thus, historically, citizenship was brought up as a
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demarcation of an urban community of equals. For the Greeks, there was no clear
distinction between morality and legality. A citizen was essentially a political being, by
which was meant both a moral and a legal entity. Citizenship was an inherited privilege
and included the rights to vote; to hold elective and appointive governmental offices; to
serve on various sorts of juries; and generally to participate in political debates as equal
community members. But since the polis was based on a restricted principle of equality
between those included, as well as on a clearly defined territory, it also strictly excluded
most of the population from participation in public affairs. Thus from the beginning, the
term entails exclusion, since not everyone is in possession of it. In fact, most inhabitants of
Athens, including the foreigner Aristotle himself, were ineligible to participate in
citizenship. The more expansive or inclusionary citizenship becomes, the less it has to
offer citizens. Consequently, it must be restricted. The Greeks preferred a strong
citizenship of exclusion in order to restrict social resources and political rights to a small
number of persons. Exclusion could either take the form of banishment from the
geopolitical territory or subordination to non-citizen status, as was the fate of slaves,
women, and children (Delanty, 2000, 11)7.
The meaning of a citizen as person with political rights to participate in processes
of popular self-governance is the first and oldest meaning of citizenship (Smith, 2002,
103), making ‘citizenship’ conceptually inseparable from political governance. This old
ideal of citizenship as popular self-governance continues to play a role in modern political
discourse and has often served since as an inspiration and instrument for political efforts to
achieve greater inclusion and democratic engagement in political life. But for that very
reason, the ancient idea of citizenship often seemed politically threatening to many rulers
who sought to abolish or redefine the concept.
This was for example the case under the Romans, where citizenship came to have a
different meaning than the one articulated by Aristotle. In principle, Roman citizenship
also carried with it the right to sit in the popular legislative assembly that had been the
hallmark of Athenian citizenship (Smith 2002, 107 ff.). But as participation in that
assembly became increasingly meaningless as well as impractical for most imperial
inhabitants, Roman citizenship become essentially a legal status defining membership of
the Roman political community, the res publica. It provided rights to legal protection by
Roman soldiers and judges in return for allegiance to Rome. Consequently, the individual

7
Similar accounts of the origin of citizenship can be found in Isin & Turner, 2002; Giesen & Eder, 2001;
Smith, 2002.
C i tiz ensh ip : F rom sta tus to proc ess 16
was seen, in the eyes of the law, as a legal being and with this came a firmer recognition of
citizenship as a question of formal equality in the public domain. But being a citizen no
longer entailed a relation to politics and citizenship no longer had any strong connection to
actual practices of self-governance. Nevertheless, the Roman conception of citizenship
sought to preserve a link with the Greek emphasis on participation in public life, but this
was very much connected with the need for legal regulation of property rights in a society
that was far more complex than the Greek polis. Thus, in the Roman society, law and
property became the indicators of citizenship, which meant the participation in the
community of shared common law (Delanty, 2002, 12).
The modern conception of citizenship was generated by the anti-monarchial
revolutions that gave rise to the first modern republics, including the short-lived
seventeenth-century Commonwealth and late eighteenth-century French Republics, as well
as the United States. In eighteenth-century France and North America to be a citizen was
once again understood as being someone involved in political self–governance. Their
conceptions of citizenship referred to the experiences of Italian city-states during the
Renaissance period that had achieved both independence and a meaningful measure of
popular self-rule. But unlike in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, the citizens of the
“modern” republics of the eighteenth-century rejected rule by hereditary monarchical and
aristocratic families in favor of a much broader community of political equals.
Furthermore, in the modern republics, self-rule by ‘citizens’ no longer took place in
‘cities’, but within ‘nations’. These were substantially larger populations who could not
have face-to-face knowledge of each other, but only be linked through symbolic ties .
These “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) could engage in self-governance, if at
all, only through more extensive reliance on systems of representation that became a
distinctive feature of modern societies (Smith, 2002, 106 ff.). The basic form of modern
citizenship then relied on the universalistic idea of equality as legal status while shifting
the meaning of citizenship from the exclusive demarcation of a privileged group to the
continual inclusion of new groups into the expansive demos.

2.2 Modern citizenship and the nation-state

The modern understanding of citizenship emerged with the creation of an

international system of states and was formalized and institutionalised along the lines of
state formation. Thus, modern citizenship was born out of the nation-state in which certain
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rights and obligations were granted to individuals under its authority. The state and
citizenship became necessarily combined to form effective technologies of government.
With the development of advanced administrative structures of the system of national
governance, the state was able to mobilize citizenship as an aspect of nationalism.
Nationalism consists of a collective claim to “nationhood”, which psychologically entails a
claim of “groupness”, typically articulated in a definition and legitimisation of the group
and its boundaries based on historic, territorial, linguistic, religious, or cultural
interdependence among its members. It comes along with a message of ingroup
distinctiveness and intergroup differentiation, as well as territorial claims (Azzi, 1998, 73).
Nationalism therefore involves a social construction process whereby the existing
differences between members of different groups are endowed with psychological
significance such that the categories become part of a collective cognitive “representation”
in which the group now appears to be a perceptual “unit” differentiated from other units.
The nation indeed constitutes the most frequently invoked category for identity
construction, despite the massive diffusion of trans- and supranational discourses (Billig,
1995). For many, the nation is a point of stability and reference in an ever moving world,
where the fragilization of social bonds and the growing material and existential insecurity
contribute to feelings of powerlessness and inefficacy. But since the “nation” is necessarily
an imagined community (Anderson, 1983), its cohesion needs to be defined and enforced
in terms of symbols and values, which in turn implies a normative definition of criteria of
inclusion. That is why the nation is particularly sensitive to threats against its founding
values and myths (Staerkle, Roux, Delay & Gianettoni, 2003). The desire to exclude
members of certain social categories is grounded on the idea that the nation needs to be
protected against persons who potentially could put into question values seen by a majority
of the native population as foundation blocks of national cohesion.
The construction of “nationhood” therefore implies a constant redefinition of who
is part of the political community, and who is not. On the legal level, processes of
inclusion and exclusion rely on two basic regulative mechanisms, nationality and
citizenship. Both nationality and citizenship refer to the nation state. Both identify the legal
status of an individual in terms of state membership. They differ, however, inasmuch as
each term refers to a different legal framework. While nationality refers to the international
legal dimension in the context of an interstate system, citizenship is largely confined to the
national dimension (Sassen, 2002, 278 ff.). According to international law, each state may
determine who is considered a citizen of that state. Nationality is therefore a component of
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citizenship, in the sense that it is a crucial dividing principle of access to citizenship by
distinguishing between those who are granted the right to benefits and protection, and
those to whom these rights are denied. Nationality performs what Kabeer (2003) calls an
“exclusion from without”. The legal status of citizenship entails the specifics of citizen
recognition by the state and provides the formal basis for the rights and responsibilities of
the individual in relation to the state (Sassen, 2002, 279). It defines the legal and
institutional criteria that confer civil, political, and social rights to specified individuals and
groups on the basis of their membership in a nation state. Citizenship therefore performs an
allocative function within the politically constructed boundaries of the nation state in that it
controls access to scarce resources and provides legitimacy to social hierarchies between
different groups within the society. It defines “exclusions from within” the nation-state
(Kabeer, 2003). Struggles for inclusion within the circle of citizenship are consequently
struggles over access to resources, and struggles over its meaning and membership are
consequently also fights for social recognition. In the construction of “nationhood”,
nationality and citizenship are both contested and debated in order to define, or redefine
the borders and content of membership in the political community.
In the most general sense, the modern conception of citizenship has been based on
the idea that membership in a society must rest upon a principle of formal equality
(Delanty, 2000, 14). Typically, modern citizenship rights derived from membership in a
nation-state include civil, political and social rights. This classic tripartite distinction of
citizenship was introduced by the English sociologist T.H. Marshall in his seminal essay,
Citizenship and Social Class, originally published in 1950. His conception of citizenship
was a progressive one, since he argued that the three citizenship dimensions developed as
part of the modernisation process of industrial, capitalist and nation-state-based, western
societies from the late seventeenth century onwards. The progressive path through which
citizenship evolved, he claimed, began with the acquisition of civil rights, followed by
political and finally social rights. Civil and political rights were first granted in response to
the demand of an emerging capitalist class, and expanded later to the working class. They
helped to ensure freedom from the coercive exercise of power necessary for capitalist
relations to flourish8. The civil dimension of citizenship rights includes the rights to
property, individual freedom and legal protection. “The civil element is composed of the
rights necessary for individual freedom – liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought

8
For detailed accounts on the political struggles that lead to the extension of citizenship rights, see for
example Roche, 2002; Smith, 2002.
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and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to
justice.” (Marshall, 1950, 10). Political rights refer to participation in the public arena and
include citizen’s right to vote and participate in the political process. “By the political
element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a
body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body”
(Marshall, 1950, 11). Social rights, finally, included income and decent housing
opportunities, as well as the right to health care and education for all citizens. Social rights
brought to completion the purely formal rights of civic and political citizenship by
alleviating the structural inequalities of capitalism, and thus were intended to bring about
equalising effects and greater equality of social opportunity (Delanty, 2000, 16).
Marshall’s theory of citizenship has been severely criticised, especially for its
hypothesis of a progressive path from civil to political to social rights9, as well as for the
partiality of his account since he focused on the male working class during the industrial
revolution in Britain. Marshall’s theory is indeed silent on race, on gender, and on the
rights of those whose lands were colonised10. But Marshall’s theory has been so influential
that many scholars and political activists equate genuine citizenship with the full
possession of all three types of rights, and use his theory as a framework for the study of
political rights and democratic governance, as well as a normative basis for the formulation
of claims towards three institutions in modern societies involved in the regulation of
citizenship, namely the legal, governmental, and welfare systems of modern western
democracies.
Because citizenship rights are multidimensional and multilayered, it is useful to
describe in more detail how these rights operate in society. Hohfeld (1978) has developed a
theory of rights involving liberties, claims, powers and immunities to which Janoski and
Gran (2002) refer in order to categorise the different citizenship rights. For them, a liberty
is exercised without obliging others to help. A claim imposes a corresponding duty on
others in order to uphold the right. Thus, a claim requires cooperation and is bounded,
while a liberty is relatively open. Powers are cooperative controls that may be imposed on
others, while immunities are the exact opposite allowing escape from control. For our
purposes, we retain three categories of rights, liberties, claims, and powers, which seem

9
Citizenship rights do not necessarily develop according to this single progressive logic.
10
For a discussion of the limits of Marshall’s theory on citizenship, see for example from a post-modern
perspective Delanty, 2000, 17-22 and Isin & Wood (1999), from a post-colonialist perspective Kabeer,
2002, 7ff; from a feminist perspective Voet, 1998.
C i tiz ensh ip : F rom sta tus to proc ess 20
essential in order to be able to illustrate the different nature of citizenship rights11. Civil
rights, such as freedom of religion, speech, due process, are often articulated as liberties, in
the sense that they refer to the ability of individuals to act as they please as long as others
are not hurt. Political rights are usually claimed as powers. By voting, citizens
cooperatively control the agenda for political action. By holding office, citizens control
other citizens in a direct way. Social rights, finally, are invoked in claims to education and
a variety of welfare services that require correlative duties from others.
While the idea of citizenship may nowadays be universal, its meanings are not.
Definitions of what it entails to be a citizen vary significantly across national contexts,
since domestic laws about who is a citizen vary from state to state. Western conceptions of
citizenship have evolved from, and continue to be framed by the two great “citizenship
traditions”, namely the republican and liberal approaches to citizenship. The liberal theory
is minimalist. Liberalism puts a strong emphasis on the individual as an autonomous social
actor, and consequently liberal rights mostly reflect individual liberties. It purports that the
role of the state is to protect the freedom of its citizens, especially by protecting the right to
property and by removing obstacles to free exchange between individuals in the market
place. The “liberal” conceptions of citizenship present civic membership as a status and
tend to uphold a more passive conception of citizenship, since they understand citizenship
rights mainly as liberties and do not imply collective responsibilities and participation
(Smith, 2002; Schuck, 2002; Delanty, 2000). In contrast, republican conceptions of
citizenship maintain that citizenship must involve rights and practices of political
participation to achieve the common good: they stress an active and more practice-oriented
conception of citizenship (Dagger, 2002; Delanty 2000). Republican theories put emphasis
on both individual and rights and collective responsibility. They articulate citizenship
rights as mainly powers and claims, and emphasize the role of conflict and contestation in
the expansion of such rights. These traditions have in turn been elaborated over time in a
number of different approaches, including their communitarian variations12 (Delanty, 2000;
Janoski & Gran, 2002). Communitarianism emphasizes the predominance of the

11
Janoski and Gran (2002) adapt Hohfeld’s classification of rights to categorize four types of citizenship
rights, legal, social, political, and participation rights in a rather straightforward way, by making them
correspond to one class of rights (social rights are claims, political rights are powers etc.). The practices of
most citizenship rights seem far too complex to be subsumed under one category of rights.
12
Much of the communitarian debate over citizenship has been confused by a failure to address the different
forms it has taken. At least two forms need to be distinguished: liberal communitarianism, associated with
Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Alisdair Macintyre; and its republican version, civic
communitarianism, associated with the work of Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Quentin Skinner and J.
Pocock (Delanty, 2002, 159 ff.).
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community (society, nation) over its members. A primary concern of communitarian
citizenship is a cohesive society organised around a common set of values which
community members are expected to endorse. The good society is built through mutual
support and group action rather than through atomistic choices and individual liberty
(Janoski & Gran, 2002). Obligations to society may often predominate over rights because
their goal is to build a strong community based on common identity, mutuality,
participation, and integration.
While useful in the understanding of various theories and practices of citizenship
across western democratic states, these three theories no longer appropriately capture the
changing nature of citizenship in the twenty-first century (Isin & Gran, 2002). The reality
of emigration and immigration, the formation of supranational and transnational bodies
such as the European Union, the formation of new successor states, the movement of
refugee populations, and the codification of international human rights norms has
challenged modern understanding of belonging and has contributed to rethinking the
meaning of citizenship. Many of these recent tendencies that put into question traditional
views on citizenship can be observed in the South Caucasus.

2.3 Citizenship as social process: claims and groups

In the last two decades, two major processes challenged the nation-state as the sole
source of authority of citizenship and democracy: globalization and post-modernisation.
These twin pressures blurred the boundaries of citizenship rights and obligations and the
forms of democracy associated with them, broadening the way citizenship is understood
and debated. “The conception of citizenship as merely a status held under the authority of a
state has been contested and broadened to include various political and social struggles of
recognition and redistribution as instances of claim-making, and hence, by extension, of
citizenship” (Isin & Gran, 2002, 2). In western countries, for example, major social issues
such as the status of immigrants, refugees and diasporic groups, gender equality,
environmental injustice, or homemade poverty have recently been framed as citizenship
concerns. This new language of citizenship is a result of what has been termed the “rights
revolution” (Doise, 2002; Ignatieff, 2003).
From the 1990s onwards, the issue of collective recognition, based on group
claims, widens the scope of rights at stake, for example through claims to ethnic, cultural,
linguistic and disability rights. Collective recognition is grounded on symbolic and
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material motivations where groups strive for inclusion and belonging, either by seeking
distinctiveness from others in order to affirm their identity, or, alternatively, by advocating
principles of equality and non-differentiation. Such tensions between claims of equality
and specificity are a central element in current debates on the role of collective rights (or
group rights) in citizenship (Staerklé, Roux, Delay, Gianettoni & Perrin, 2003). By
claiming group rights, minorities aim to correct a situation in which they feel
disadvantaged, either because they are confronted to unfair treatment or structural
disadvantages, or because they are unsatisfied with the symbolic status of their group in
relation to a dominant reference group (including for example claims against
discrimination or in favour of political autonomy). Since group rights are never granted in
an unproblematic and consensual way, they always involve political debate, social struggle
and collective mobilisation. Hence, group claims that are formulated as citizenship rights
confer citizenship a process-oriented and active component.
Claiming groups are defined and define themselves in relation to other groups in a
society structured by various principles of social division that organise the subordination of
groups. In order to grant rights to group members, group boundaries need to be defined
with as little ambiguity as possible, and the criteria retained to define them are regularly at
the centre of political debate. Hence, by claiming rights, social groups are constructed as
political agents, and endowed with a particular status through which they are recognised as
a politically relevant unit.
More generally, these struggles have drawn the attention to informal citizenship
practices that go beyond voting, including civic engagement, participation in social
movements and protest, neighbourhood help, or actions that have been hitherto associated
to the private realm, such as family involvement or caring activities. There is now growing
agreement that citizenship must also be defined as a social process through which
individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding or losing rights (Isin & Gran,
2002; Isin & Wood, 1999; Delanty, 2000; Lister, 1997).
Yet, increasingly, claiming rights in the name of a group is not only a social
process, but also a source and marker of social identity. In south Caucasus group rights are
often articulated around claims emanating from ethnic minorities. Identification with
ethnic, religious or linguistic groups at a sub-national or transnational level shape the
identities of citizens and the meaning they confer to their experience of citizenship.
Depending on the groups to which citizens belong and feel attached, membership in the
nation-state may be contested or defended.
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2.4 Conceptual framework for the study of citizenship as
social process

As the section on groups and claims has made clear, in the past ten years, scholarly
interest has increasingly focussed on citizenship as the outcome of interaction processes
between different forms of belonging, for example the articulation between membership in
the nation-state and (ethnic) subgroup identification (Kabeer, 2002), between national,
supranational or regional allegiances (Eder & Giesen, 2001), or, more generally, between
principles of “difference” and “equality” (Isin & Wood, 1999). The way these interactions
shape the patterns of access to and exclusion from citizenship rights in different political
contexts has become a key theme in citizenship studies13. While the methodological and
disciplinary approaches are highly diversified in the emerging field of citizenship studies,
researchers from various disciplines and policy domains (education, welfare, international
relations, migration to mention only a few) share the same urgent concern: to rethink the
political agent (on the individual and group level) in these new economic, social and
cultural conditions that make possible the articulation of new claims and their form and
content as citizenship rights (Isin & Turner, 2002, 1).
To study this process of redefinition and reconfiguration of citizenship, Isin and
Turner (2002, 1-2) propose a conceptual framework based on three fundamental axes of
citizenship: extent, content and depth. The extent of citizenship in a given nation-state is
determined by rules and norms of inclusion and exclusion, defining how the boundaries of
membership within a political community or between political communities should be set.
The content of citizenship relates to the specific combination of citizenship rights and
responsibilities in a given context, regulating how the benefits and burdens of membership
should be allocated. A modern democratic state is expected to uphold a combination of
citizenship rights and obligations even though the precise combination and depth of such
rights vary from one state to another. Finally, the practice of citizenship depends on its

13
Citizenship studies is not yet an institutionalized field. It has established itself de facto as an
interdisciplinary field in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s, and includes today a growing
literature by scholars in feminist studies, queer studies, Aboriginal studies, African studies, diasporic studies,
race and ethnic studies, migration studies, environmental studies, urban studies who are exploring and
addressing concepts of sexual citizenship, ecological citizenship, diasporic citizenship, multicultural
citizenship, differentiated citizenship (Isin & Gran, 2002).
C i tiz ensh ip : F rom sta tus to proc ess 24
depth, in other words on how the identities of the members of a political community should
be comprehended and accommodated. “Thick” citizenship prescribes educated, active and
participating citizens , whereas “thin” citizenship is based on a minimalist view of the
members of a political community, merely entitled to passive rights of legal protection and
formal participation through voting or paying taxes.
Tilly (1996) proposed an encompassing view of the complexities of modern
citizenship, by describing citizenship as an historical, relational, cultural, and contingent
public identity. It is historical in calling attention to the path-dependent actualisation of
memories, understandings and means of action in the construction of citizenship. Nation-
states often use other previously existing ties (e.g. founding myths, historical distortions)
as bases for new forms of citizenship or as grounds for exclusion form citizenship. Imputed
ethnicity or nationality provide cases in point. Citizenship is relational in the sense that it
locates identities in connections among individuals, groups and the state rather than in the
minds of particular persons or whole populations. Citizenship is cultural, Tilly insists,
because social identities rest on shared understandings and their representations. And
finally, citizenship is contingent in that it regards its practices as a strategic interaction
liable to failure rather than as a straightforward expression of an actor’s attributes.
We aimed at founding our own approach to the study of popular conceptions of
citizenship in south Caucasus upon such a large and inclusive notion of citizenship: we
understand citizenship as a historically embedded, social process, and as an organizing
principle of social interaction between individuals, social groups and the state. Most
empirical citizenship studies focus on the regulation of citizenship from a legal, political or
economic perspective. They study for example the social and political consequences of
these regulative mechanisms for specific social groups, or the impact of public policies on
citizenship-relevant domains such as education, welfare, migration, or international
relations. We have chosen a different approach to the empirical study of citizenship: we
analyse how a young generation of ordinary citizens makes sense of their citizenship
experience, as members of the newly created nation-states in the South Caucasus. The
political context, as well as the theoretical justification and the general work hypothesis
that guided our empirical study of popular conceptions of citizenship are laid out in the
following chapters.