The Historic Conquest of Citizenship

The Historic Conquest of Citizenship

Athens and Ancient Citizenship


The concept of citizenship appeared in Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries before
Christ. It describes the way free individuals, who because of their condition could take
responsibility for the dealing with public matters, participated in city life. These cities were
actually medium-sized towns called polis. This term refers to a city-state, which means, not
only the union of citizens but also the way in which they were organised. Not everyone had the condition of citizen (polites), because women, children and slaves were not considered capable of taking on the responsibility of running the city. The ones who had the condition of citizens were obliged to participate in the running of the city, holding positions in equality and changing positions from time to time.


Rome and the Limits of Laws

Another important moment in the history of citizenship came with the expansion of the
Roman Empire. Rome developed the Greek idea of citizenship and spread it throughout the
Mediterranean. Roman Law developed the procedures for taking part in the life of the Republic and obtaining citizenship. To be a citizen of Rome was a privilege and honour people from other places could achieve if they obeyed the laws of the Empire or the Republic. From the first century before Christ to the third after Christ, the concept of citizenship changed, not only because it spread throughout the Mediterranean, but because it raised a very important problem: could only those who obeyed Roman laws be citizens? Was it possible to have another law, another Republic and another way of being a citizen?

Stoic philosophers like Seneca and Cicero set out an interesting transformation of the concept of the citizen and extended it to individuals capable of submitting to the laws of reason, as if the city in which they had to live was not a real city as had been seen up until then, but rather a "virtual" city in which all human beings could participate.

National Citizenship, Modern Citizenship

This tension between the real citizenship imposed by Rome and the virtual citizenship
in which one took part only by using reason and considering himself to be part of the world,
would mark the birth of the modern concept of citizenship. Apart from this tension between
written and unwritten laws, from the 6th century onwards, the concept of citizenship would be directly related to the new ways of understanding the Republic which, from then on, would receive the name of "nation". Citizenship became national and was limited by the state of belonging to a territory, by the link to a sovereign power and by the achievement of certain benefits in exchange for certain responsibilities. With the appearance of modern nations, sovereignty was the responsibility of the nation as a whole (national sovereignty) or of the people defined as a group formed by all individuals (popular sovereignty).