Democratic citizenship

The exercising of our citizenship is always done in a historical context that is always
evolving and changing. Therefore it is important to approach the exercising of citizenship  historical point of view. That means, knowing that our pretentions to citizenship are not the first and will not be the last.

In recent decades, moral philosophy and politics have not approached citizenship only
in legal terms, as if the practise of the citizenship was only reduced to the relation between the people and the legal systems or legislation itself. Nowadays, as well as speaking of legal
citizenship, we use terms such as social, cultural, economic and even intercultural citizenship.

In order to refer to all of these things as part of peoples' democratic life we shall speak of
"democratic citizenship".

In this unit we will look at how the concept of citizenship has changed, and to what
extent it has been related, from the very beginning, to political organisation. Sometimes we
refer to political organisation in terms of government (polis, republic) and this is the reason why it is important to understand the relationship between citizenship and types of states. Nowadays we only speak of true citizenship when there is a state ruled by laws, values and human rights.

We also describe political organisations as "democracy", describing not only the forms of
government, but also a form of participating in public matters, of identifying with a political
community and promoting a worthwhile existence for all human beings.

One of the most important institutions in the development of democratic citizenship is
the Public Administration. It is a part of an executive power, not only in a national sense, but also in the context of an autonomous region and in a local sense. Nowadays, democratic citizenship is not only practised on a national level. On the one hand it is open to a cosmopolitan citizenship, where the people in a country consider themselves as citizens of the world; for example the way people in Spain are citizens of the European Union. On the other hand, democratic citizenship is open to an environment of proximity in which local and autonomous powers participate. In Spain, the city halls and autonomous regions are institutions that administer increasingly more public services every day. 

This idea of service has developed historically as the ideas of separation of powers and social justice have become part of citizens'democratic convictions.