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Citizenship and Nationality

Chapter · January 2016

DOI: 10.1002/9781118663202.wberen560

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Citizenship and Nationality
Nelli Piattoeva
University of Tampere, Finland
nelli.piattoeva@uta.fi

Abstract:
Citizenship and nationality are commonly treated as synonymous, or at least, as two sides of the
same political coin. The bundling of the terms is essentially a product of the modern territorial
nation-state and the ideology of nationalism that asserts congruity between the state and the nation.
This entry provides an overview of the different political processes and ideological beliefs at the
background of this development. It also discusses how globalization, in its different forms,
challenges the bond between the two concepts.

Main Text:
Citizenship constitutes a package of liberal rights (e.g. freedom of association, freedom of speech
and conscience and the general freedom to lead meaningful lives) and responsibilities (e.g. to
exercise autonomous and critical reasoning in elections and surveillance of political leaders). In
addition, it is commonly defined in national terms and is bounded by the national state and its
institutions. Rights and responsibilities are protected by national constitutions, and it is by virtue of
belonging to the national community that individuals are granted the privileges of citizenship
(Kymlicka 2003). Essentially, citizenship and nationality are treated as synonymous, or at least, as
two sides of the same political coin. When nationality is discussed in relation to citizenship, it is
thus assigned a meaning different to that employed in international law. It connotes membership in
the intangible mental community of the nation and grasps the individual, psychological bond
inherent to citizenship. In addition, it restricts citizenship to the realm of a national community
joined by a common identity beyond individual rights and duties. In this manner, nationality is a kin
concept to national identity and falls in the realm of national imagination that is premised on the
elusive and largely illusory horizontal tie between people (e.g. Anderson 1983). It is nationality as a
(sub)conscious conviction, and not merely citizenship, which is assumed to differentiate members
of a particular nation-state from those of others.
The nationalisation of citizenship (Isinand Turner 2007), that is, the bundling of
citizenship and nationality, is essentially a product of the modern territorial nation-state that justifies
itself in the name of the people – the sovereign nation that it claims to encompass and represent. It
is the advent of this political thinking that consolidated the dual character of citizenship as inclusion
into a self-governing political community and into a specific national community marked by
territorial boundaries and unique cultural practices (Castles 2005). Before the late eighteenth
century citizenship and nationality could hardly be related because they were linked to different
socio-political entities (Heater 2004). The male citizens of Ancient Greece identified with particular
cities, whereas inhabitants of the Roman Empire held sub-imperial ethnic identities. In the Middle
Ages, citizenship belonged to the realm of municipalities, not countries or ethnically demarcated
regions. Only in the eighteenth century, and increasingly so in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries seized by the ideology of nationalism, did the nation gain the same connotation as the
terms country or fatherland.
The arrival of the idea of interchangeability between nationality and citizenship is
attributed to the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
(Heater 2002). The latter recognized individual citizens as members of an undivided and integrated
nation-state that is differentiated from others of similar kind. In this period the idea of citizenship as
an individual entitlement was embedded in the Lockean contract theory, and was simultaneously
complemented by the civic republican notion of citizenship as membership in and loyalty to a
political community. The nationalistic doctrine promoted the belief that political and national units
should correspond. As citizen was detached from its local meaning and attached to the state, so
nation and nationality were gradually elevated to the state level. The merger of nationality and
citizenship implied that citizen’s rights and duties were available for those sharing the cultural
bond, speaking the national language and possessing a sense of loyalty to the nation-state.
The establishment of the modern state led to a challenging split between the public
and private spheres. The nationalistic doctrine provided a solution to the problem of reconciling
presumably selfish individual interests with the public duties of enfranchised citizens. Nationality
was also thought to subsume other, competing identifications (ethnic, familial, class etc.). This was
important for ensuring that what was central to the citizenship ideal of equality was not endangered
by, for instance, marked class divisions or ancient privileges. The mistrust of competing identities
led to widespread prohibition of double or multiple citizenship, arguing that citizenship is premised
on undivided loyalty to one nation-state. At the same time, linguistic and cultural differences were
perceived as constraints on the united public opinion indispensable to the work of representative
governments. Thus the fusion of citizenship and nationality was a means to foster state legitimacy,
integration and stability, and later the functioning of a representative democracy. However,
nationality was also a means to control political debates in the period of a rapid massification of
national politics by setting symbolic limits on what can be discussed and enacted in the name of the
nation, and by whom. Along deliberate nationalizing policies, the proximity of nationality and
citizenship was promoted by numerous less or not exclusively nationalist-driven policies linked to
industrialization and the centralization of the state, e.g. national taxation, mass conscription, rise of
mass literature and printing, and compulsory schooling. If the ideal of nationality and citizenship
was ever and anywhere achieved, it was only due to the fact that state policies provided something
tangible in return, for example, security, continuity or welfare.
The proximity between citizenship and nationality has always been context-bound.
Some nations have historically been more “political” and less “cultural” than others. When
citizenship is strongly linked to nationality, it can turn out exclusive and conceive of the nation-state
as a people with common roots, traditions, history and language. A looser link between the two
terms would mean adherence to common political values. There also exists an alternative
understanding of nationality and its link, or absence thereof, to citizenship that can be traced to a
different variant of a modern state – the empire-state of the late Soviet Union. This exemplified a
markedly different perception of integration of its constituent society into a political community,
despite the fact that it operated with concepts borrowed from the vocabulary of the nation-state, i.e.
autonomy, sovereignty and nationality. The Soviet regime codified nationality as an ethnocultural
cognitive and social category that was neither elevated to the state-wide level nor attached to the
notion of (Soviet) citizenship (Brubaker 2005). The asymmetrical and hierarchical treatment of the
Soviet people on the basis of their nationality as an institutionalized category of political practice
meant that entitlements to rights were not determined by universal citizenship, but by one’s national
affiliation (ascribed by the authorities). The principle of nationality along the essentially hollow
notion of citizenship was consolidated on two levels. First, the Soviet Union was structured on an
ethnic basis granting many nationalities their own territories with varying political autonomies,
mimicking nation-states. Second, nationality was consolidated on the personal level by ascribing it
to each individual on the so-called fifth line of the national passport. In this manner the Soviet
Union gave rise to two forms of identification that were far from the blend of nationality and
citizenship: one strongly linked to the sub-state nationhood, as in the case of non-Russians living in
non-Russian national territories, and another being a supranational or imperial identity of Russians
and Russophones.
Globalization is expected to put an end to the historically sealed union between
nationality and citizenship. Their de-bundling means that rights, responsibilities, participation and
identity are no longer united by a coherent national framework (Delanty 2000). The nation-state is
losing as a vital source of national identity and as a basis for the discourse of citizenship, having to
come to terms with the fact that new forms of citizenship, such as European, global, cosmopolitan,
environmental and others, are simultaneously on the agenda. National citizenship is challenged by
the establishment of transnational bodies claiming people’s allegiance, the institutionalization of
human rights which assert, by definition, that rights emanate from the humanity itself as opposed to
membership in a nation, and the processes of international migration that diversify national societies
and increase the number of people who hold identities distinct from and sometimes opposite to the
pillars of national identity. The latter is particularly true for nation-states that adhere to exclusionary
notions of who is considered to be a legitimate member of the national community (e.g. countries
adhering to the jus sanguinis principle). Citizenship must now reconcile the initial pursuit of
equality and universality with the recognition of difference. This question is essentially about
whether or not the two concepts can be perceived in a multilayered fashion, as opposed to viewing
them through a zero-sum game logic.
There are other developments that weaken the earlier mutually beneficial contract
between the state and citizens, and consequently estrange citizens from the realm of the nation-state.
For instance, states withdraw from or narrow down previous welfare commitments that evened out
socio-economic differences. They produce political decisions that emanate from the supra-national
level and thus lack democratic approval by the national citizenry. The upsurge of formal citizenship
education across a wide spectrum of compulsory education systems can be interpreted as an attempt
to sustain the legitimacy of the nation-state and stress the responsibilities of citizens to the state,
despite the failure of the latter to fulfill its own. These programs advocate restoration of a sense of
common citizenship and national identity, and thus represent attempts to sustain some linkage
between nationality and citizenship amidst socio-political processes that have called it into question.
The nation-state as a hegemonic political model is deeply embedded in the current
international system. On the one hand, this paves the way for an idea that genuine societies are only
those where social, cultural and political dimensions coincide. Thus new and reconfigured states of
the post-Iron Curtain period have strived to build cohesion between citizenship and national
identity. These political processes were not always democratic, but relied to various degrees on
biased interpretations of history and assimilation or exclusion of cultural and linguistic difference in
the name of national unity. On the other hand, the assumption that political norms apply within
nation-states conceived of as well integrated societies has been illusive to the point of being taken
for granted. For instance, democratic theories are argued to have failed to acknowledge that a
collective identity is needed for democratic aspirations to make sense (Canovan 1998). Democracy
has a much more stringent requirements in the way of collective identity than more repressive forms
of polity, but democratic theorists have taken for granted the political community that developed
prior to the advent of democratic politics. At the same time, it was the democratic politics that
strengthened the bond between the state and citizens by making political decisions representative of
and accountable to the national will, and providing individual social and economic benefits
unforeseen earlier.

SEE ALSO: Citizenship; Collective Memory; Empire; Ethnonationalism; Imagined Communities;

National Identity; Nationalism; Nation-State and Nationalism.

References:
Anderson, Benedict. 2003 [1991]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Brubaker, Roger. 2005 [1996]. Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in
the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Canovan, Margaret.1998. Nationhood and Political Theory. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Castles, Stephen. 2005. “Hierarchical Citizenship in a World of Unequal Nation-States.” Political
Science and Politics 38(4): 689-692. DOI: 10.1017/S1049096505050353.
 Delanty, Gerard. 2000. Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Isin, Engin F., and Bryan S. Turner. 2007. “Investigating Citizenship: an Agenda for Citizenship
Studies.” Citizenship Studies 11(1): 5-17. DOI: 10.1080/13621020601099773.
Heater, Derek. 2002. What is Citizenship? Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Heater, Derek. 2004. A Brief History of Citizenship. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Kymlicka, Will. 2003. “Two Dilemmas of Citizenship Education in Pluralist Societies.” In
Education for Democratic Citizenship: Issues for Theory and Practice, edited by Andrew Lockyer,
Bernard Crick, and John Annette, 47-63. Ardershot: Ashgate.

Further reading:
Breuilly, John. 1993. Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of
Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge.
Smith, Anthony D. 2001. Nationalism. Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity.

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