Abstract
Citizenship is usually seen as a product of modern nation-states, or of other political entities which possess institutional infrastructures and political systems capable of producing a coherent framework that defines the relationship between that system and its members. In this paper, we show that an early system of modern citizenship was created in the absence of a formal state, notably by the cultural elite of a stateless nation. The Polish case illustrates that an elite may become a dominant class in the given society only later, and institutionalize that early citizenship system within the framework of a newly founded state. As a result of the legacy of the emergence of citizenship predating the restoration of statehood, the contemporary Polish citizenship model is influenced by a strong and largely overlooked cultural component that emerged at the turn of the 19th century. This model uses the figure of the intelligentsia member as its ideal citizen. Despite the dramatic political and economic changes in the decades which have passed since its emergence, this cultural frame, which was institutionalized during the interwar period, still defines the key features of the Polish citizenship model. Consequently, we argue that the culturalization of citizenship is hardly a new phenomenon. It can be seen as a primary mechanism in the formation of civic polities within the imperial context. Moreover, it shows that such processes can have many ambiguous aspects as far as their Orientalizing forces of exclusion are concerned.
Highlights
The intelligentsia as the naturalized frame for the Polish citizenship model The notion of citizenship in the classical literature on the subject is usually related to the multidimensional, but the predominantly political, concept of belonging to a well-defined political entity
The case of Poland demonstrates that a political community founded by the elite of a stateless nation divided between three imperial administrations was able to reconstruct its modern mythology and national identity at the turn of the 20th century and was able to agree on an autonomous framework of civic belonging, which was parallel to the still existent formal citizenship in the old imperial states of Austria, Prussia, and Russia
Our broader argument here is that a clear differentiation between ethnic or national cultural criteria of the definition of citizenship, on the one hand, and cultural criteria naturalized through the figure of the ideal citizen, on the other, may be very helpful in studying the historical roots of the modes of exclusion that contemporary citizenship models use
Summary
The intelligentsia as the naturalized frame for the Polish citizenship model The notion of citizenship in the classical literature on the subject is usually related to the multidimensional, but the predominantly political, concept of belonging to a well-defined political entity. The case of Poland demonstrates that a political community founded by the elite of a stateless nation divided between three imperial administrations was able to reconstruct its modern mythology and national identity at the turn of the 20th century and was able to agree on an autonomous framework of civic belonging, which was parallel to the still existent formal citizenship in the old imperial states of Austria, Prussia, and Russia This framework has proven to be largely determined by cultural criteria and remains so to this day, as we will argue in this paper. It was used at many occasions to exclude from full citizenship rights representatives of Jews, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and above all representatives of the lower classes, but in ways which did not name their identities overtly as reasons of exclusion, pointing instead to deficits of civic values defined by the intelligentsia’s ideals perspective
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