Citizenship is a legal status conferring rights and responsibilities in a given state or political community. This can be obtained through birth, the nationality of one or both parents, or by a process known as naturalisation. It generally entails acceptance of the rule of law, and may also bring other entitlements such as access to welfare benefits or family reunion visas.
In contemporary European liberal democracies citizenship is usually considered a positive thing. It has been associated with ideas of cohesion and integration and a sense of belonging, which are themselves seen as important policy objectives. In this context there have been recent changes in the processes of acquiring formal citizenship, including the introduction of a number of tests designed to promote this. However, there is growing evidence that the test approach is making citizenship acquisition more difficult.
The word citizen derives from the ancient Greek idea of polis, a small-scale organic community of people living together in city-states, where duties and responsibilities were deeply connected to everyday life. For the Greeks it was not possible to separate a person’s public and private lives, or as Aristotle put it: “To him who does nothing publicly is not a man”.
However, the concept of citizenship has changed considerably since these early days. The term has mainly come to mean a legal relationship to a particular country or state, and is often used in combination with other terms such as subject and national. The distinction between these terms is complex. The term citizen is preferred for the person who owes allegiance to a nationality and can claim protection from it; subject refers to those not protected, which may include children of foreign citizens or those who have only nominal allegiance to their state (such as refugees).
Although it was not the case for most of history, in modern times it is possible to be a citizen of several states at once. This is due to the spread of globalisation, which has enabled people from different countries to live in many places simultaneously. It is also due to the fact that most states are now member states of the United Nations, which provides a common framework for international law. The legal concept of citizenship varies from one state to another, but the fundamental principles are similar, as is the way in which it is acquired.
The changing nature of citizenship has implications for the nature of laws and the way they are created. Laws serve four main purposes: establishing standards, maintaining order, resolving disputes and protecting liberties and rights. As such they shape politics, economics, history and society in a multitude of ways. In particular they shape the way people understand themselves and others, and the way that people interact with each other. It is this interplay between laws and the notion of citizenship that has led to a change in the relation between settlement and citizenship, particularly in the UK. The breaking of the link between a temporary period of residence and the right to apply for settlement, or to become a citizen by naturalisation, marks a break with past practice. This shift comes at a time of’super-diversity’, when people are moving to the UK for all sorts of reasons and for very different lengths of stay.