The Citizen and the State: A Paradoxical Relation

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that modern states and modern societies were formed through the construction of citizenship as a pattern of social attachment, membership and legal norm formation. Citizenship originally developed as a principle that removed feudal legal orders from society, and it underpinned the processes of territorial unification, institution building, centralized integration and democratic participation that characterize modern nation states and national societies. However, the article argues that, both at the functional level and at the normative level, the trajectories contained in national citizenship were not fully realized within national societies, defined by national legal orders. It was only as a system of global legal norms emerged outside national societies, shaping inner-societal patterns of and institutional construction and norm formation, that the basic potentials of national citizenship were fully realized.