Citizen and Citizenship in the Era of Globalization

Abstract

The present chapter offers a short account of citizenship, its history, its constitution, and its main theoretical approaches. It is divided in four principal sections. The first examines the two main theories of citizenship in their historical and normative context, thus the republican and liberal approach of citizenship as they were formed in the ancient Greek and Roman tradition, as well as in their current feminist critic. The second part focuses on the analyses of what seems up until now to be the most influential work on citizenship, the essay of the British sociologist, Thomas Humphrey Marshall “Citizenship and Social Class,” which was published in 1950 and since then is considered to be the stepping-stone of the international literature on citizenship. The third part presents the “constitution” of citizenship, the elements of which the notion of citizen is crafted, thus membership in a certain political community, rights, and the ability of democratic participation. Finally, the last part examines the modern apprehension of citizenship, its supranational dynamic, its ability to act as a means of integration and coercion in the modern liberal democracies, while theories of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and post-nationalism are taken into account. Instead of conclusions, the chapter closes with a short post-script concerning the fallacies and prospects of a European citizenship.