The Varied Geographies of Citizenships
Alexander C. Diener, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences University of Kansas, USA
The concept of citizenship has demonstrated a profound capacity for reinterpretation, reformulation, and nuancing over time. This said, it has often been linked to specific scales of place or types of places, which tend to coincide with the dominant political territories of certain eras. Should this be regarded as an evolving search for a geographic optimality for citizenship?
To view states as the terminus of a linear, historical process linking identity to territory gives short shrift to the various political geographic structures that have emerged, submerged, and re-emerged in the spatiality of political belonging throughout world history. Moreover, conceiving of citizenship as evolutionary risks ignoring the alternative notions of socio-political membership, sometimes territorialized and sometimes not, that have existed and continue to coexist within, and in opposition to, the nation-state system. This article considers various manifestations of human socio-spatial organization, including the polis, the empire, and the nation state, to demonstrate how other definitions of citizenship have manifested in conjunction with varied modes of political territorial organization and, equally importantly, at times rejected geographic limitation.
Placing the Earliest Citizenships
The earliest forms of human socio-political organization involved small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. These groups would occasionally coalesce into larger tribal associations, adopting systems of chiefdom governance and limited degrees of social stratification. Membership in such bands was rather fixed, and the demands of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle placed severe restrictions on the scale and duration of these arrangements.
The Neolithic Revolution (circa 10,000 BCE) involved not only the advent of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals but also social stratification and specialization. These all combined with technological innovations to catalyze new and more durable institutions of political organization, namely small-scale states or poleis. Poleis manifested as relatively small urban cores and their immediate agricultural hinterlands in a variety of regional settings (for example, the Indus, Mesopotamia, Nile, and Yellow river basins, Mesoamerica, and the Northern Andes). The integrated economic systems they supported have compelled scholars to refer to them as city-states, initiating a long-standing relationship between urban settings and concepts of citizenship.
Though emerging in clusters within an area of linguistically related people, the city-states of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Sumerians were regularly embroiled in inter-polity warfare. Subjugation of one polis by a stronger neighbor gave rise to ethnic states in which the governing elite and other privileged classes — merchants, priests, scribes, warriors, and so on — shared common cultural traditions. In circumstances where ethnic states extended their scope of conquest beyond an immediate and readily accessible territory, the term ‘empire’ may be applied. Although ruling elites were generally drawn from the dominant ethnic group, an imperial concept of citizenship acquired a relatively multi-ethnic character.
The sustained appeal of empire formation is evinced by the political histories of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile basins, in which the succession of Achaemenid, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires, and millennia of Pharaonic dynasties, perpetuated complexly inclusive but still stratified socio-political memberships. Beyond the broader Fertile Crescent region, however, tribal, city-state, and ethnic-state variants of socio-political organization held sway.
While city-states, ethnic states, and empires had distinct advantages and proved remarkably durable under the right circumstances, they were embroiled in a dynamic ebb and flow between centralization with direct territorial control and systems of decentralization and vassalage. The latter were, therefore, common. Those living outside of poleis and ethnic states and on the frontiers of empires (hunter-gatherers, mobile pastoralists, or small-scale agriculturalists) were in complex relationships with the ‘citizens’ of political territorial entities for resources, land use, and power. One may contend that state citizenship requires an ‘other’ against which membership may be defined and that the geographic imaginary of citizenship is founded on bounded spaces of responsibility and limitations of moral concern. But should this be regarded as an innate aspect of human behavior or as the choice commonly enacted by elites?
Though the history of citizenship is overwhelmingly linked to specific places, an alternative is articulated in Diogenes the Cynic’s proclaiming himself a “citizen of the world” (kosmou polite, or citizen of the cosmos) and thereby defying the polis as a source of identity construction by embracing an ideal of cosmopolitanism. The Stoics also put forth a mode of moral responsibility based on concentric circles of compassion, in which larger webs of mutual obligation extend from self and family to community, region, and ultimately the world.
Places of Belonging in Classical Antiquity
With material technologies moving from Bronze to Iron, human pre-history moves to human history, and chroniclers emphasize the rise, fall, and churn of successive empires on a global scale. From the Mediterranean basin to the plains of Eastern Central Asia, the concept of the state as empire came to dominate broad swaths of land and commensurately afforded large numbers of people status as ‘citizens’. But where Rome and the Han Dynasty are often credited with forming clear divisions (Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall) between their territories and those of ‘others’ (citizens and non-citizens), in practice they relied on a range of territorial and social strategies that often produced ‘fuzzy boundaries’. Nevertheless, for later generations, these empires came to represent the epitome of territorially integrated, centrally administered states, while citizenship claimed a new status through the concept of ‘rights’. One prominent example of leveraging this power of belonging is Paul the Apostle’s claim to Roman citizenship and the right to a trial in Rome as a way to evade flogging at the hands of his captors in Judea.
While the idea of the state as empire and citizenship as ‘right-based belonging’ appeared well on its way to becoming an irresistible logic and the defining characteristic of ‘civilization’, its status as the natural order of things was nonetheless questioned by advocates of cosmopolitanism. When Plutarch, for example, said, “We should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors”, he indicted the practice of ‘othering’ and the circumscription of moral responsibility inherent to political territorialization.
Destabilizing the Natural Order of Citizenship
The ‘natural order’ ideal in which empires were commonly couched, in conjunction with notions of a monarch’s ‘divine right’ to rule, was also challenged by a variety of alternative concepts of political organization and standards of group membership (the Hanseatic League, the Turkic Khaganates and other nomadic confederations, papal authority, and so on). For reasons that remain the subject of much debate, this period witnessed large-scale migrations out of the Eurasian Steppe region by semi-nomadic groups governed through tribal lineages, personal oaths of loyalty, and cavalry-warrior ethea. The Germanic, Hunnic, Mongol, Scythian, Slavic, Tatar, and Turkic tribes, to name a few, seemed the antithesis of sedentary states as empires.
Through a series of both accommodative and conflictual interactions with these groups, the seemingly ascendant imperial structure of the period was shown to be fragile. Imperial sustainability was undermined also by internal strife that resulted in many empires fragmenting into a loose and shifting assortment of petty states and feudal systems. While the pretense of imperial authority persisted, new spatialities of power and belonging emerged. Catholic Popes, for example, claimed universal sovereignty over religious matters, which were invariably entwined with secular affairs. Other types of feudal arrangements often manifested in complex networks of allegiance between empires, lords, and vassals. These were hardly unique to medieval Europe, so there was little to suggest that the groundwork was being laid for a new manifestation of the state and the ideal of communal membership.
Towards Modern Citizenships and the Nation State
While claims of divine mandate for absolute rule can be found throughout history and in a variety of regional settings, European monarchs proved adept at coupling these with capacities to establish and maintain more direct rule over their subjects. Monarchical alliances with a burgeoning urban-based merchant class incrementally garnered power from the lesser nobility and the Church. In European medieval and Renaissance cities, modern notions of citizenship took shape, wherein an urban elite (burghers and bourgeoisie) gained limited local rights and powers. But it was the growing capacity to precisely demarcate land and identify people as belonging to one state or another that laid the socio-territorial foundations of modern states.
International agreements, most notably the Peace of Westphalia treaties of 1648, gradually codified a system of statehood. These agreements mutually affirmed territorial sovereignty, which accorded the right to govern free from outside interference, and the status of states as equals and the only legitimate actors in international affairs. Violations of these precepts were common, but this specific scale of statehood and its commensurate ideal of membership gained standing on practical and normative grounds. This served to naturalize a system of socio-spatial organization that ultimately became the international system we know today.
While a qualitative shift occurred with the French Revolution and its precept that sovereignty lies with the people and their consent to be governed, the territorial scaffolding of citizenship remained the same. The state’s role would nevertheless be recast in service to the nation rather than the opposite. Once again, despite voices calling for more universal conceptions of human community (for example, philosophers Christopher Martin Weiland and Immanuel Kant and the founder of the Bahá’í faith Báhá’u’llah), the notion of citizenship coalesced around a group of people with a shared cultural identity, usually embodied by a primary language. ‘Nationalists’ posited that the political borders of the state should be congruent with the cultural-linguistic borders of their nations, thereby giving rise to the ideal of the nation state. While various forms of citizenship and/or rights emerged under different political, legal, and/or socio-religious systems, jus soli (right of the soil) and jus sanguinis (right of blood) were the most common.
Jus soli was usually associated with multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, imperial yet territorially cohesive states within Europe (such as France), while jus sanguinis was associated with territorially fragmented ethnic states (such as Germany). Both forms of citizenship coalesced through different processes, highlighting the distinct role of state-building and territory. Although there are variations, mixed or blended forms (such as the USA) and local distinctions (such as Switzerland — jus domicile), both became international norms and remain predominant today.
Colonialism and the Homogenizing of Citizenship
The status of national citizenship and territorial sovereignty was enhanced by Europe’s wars of the 19th and 20th centuries and the colonial ventures preceding and during these centuries. Wars united populations around ideals of the ‘sacred nation’, and colonies manifested as territories operationally and institutionally imbued with the sovereignty of their patron societies. It should, however, be noted that the benefits of full citizenship were rarely extended to the non-European populations.
Variance in the methods of European colonization resulted in direct rule and an influx of settlers in some cases, while indirect rule through local clients and a negligible European presence was prevalent in others. In line with the largely unheeded advocates for less circumscribed ideals of belonging and morality in earlier eras, voices promoting the rights of non-European peoples existed throughout the colonial era. For example, the 16th-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas spoke on behalf of Native Americans and against Spanish genocidal practices. Europeans nevertheless almost universally privileged economic gain and pursuit of imperial advantage in colonial ventures over the enlightened ideals gaining traction at home.
Indigenous territorial practices and political structures were circumvented, marginalized, or plowed under to make way for Europe’s modernist preferences for bounded space and fixed citizenship. These preferences reached an apex during the so-called Scramble for Africa (1881–1914), when European negotiators superimposed a map on the continent that resulted in the crosscutting and division of groups possessing long-standing ideals of community and membership. A similar process unfolded across much of Asia.
In the aftermath of the First World War, international law sought to reconcile, however imperfectly, the basic principles of Westphalia with the new realities of nationalism. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points but also in subsequent iterations of international law, including the UN’s founding charter of 1945, nation-state principles were affirmed as a global norm. By the 1970s, most colonies had transitioned, sometimes through revolution and sometimes by attrition, to sovereign states.
This process should not, however, be viewed as natural or as an inevitable evolution to an optimal stage of socio-spatiality. Efforts to enshrine this norm have always met with the protestations of anarchists, Marxists, certain religious groups, and internationalists, and, though this point is overlooked in much of the scholarly and policy literature, they have continually coexisted with trans- and sub-national economic, political, and communal practices. More so today than at any point in history, such dynamics are conspicuous and considered threatening to the nation-state norm. A variety of processes under the broad category of globalization (neoliberal capitalism, mass migration, communication technology, transnational human rights regimes, and so on) challenge national citizenship in important ways.
While standard political maps continue to portray the world as a collection of discrete territorial units and naturalize national ‘circles of we’, it is important to consider how they obscure the complexity of supra- and sub-state citizenships, cross-border relationships, and the daily practices of integration that pervade the contemporary processes of human life.
