8.1 Introduction
Citizenship denotes membership of a political community — a distinctive relation shared among relative equals in public life, conferring rights and privileges and generating duties and obligations. Societies such as ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval European city-states gave definitive legal and political expression to this relation.
With the rise of modern liberal states, citizenship — initially confined to a small fraction of permanent residents — was progressively extended to larger segments of the population. The demand for equality came to be expressed primarily as equal citizenship, which became the normative tool for socio-political inclusion of groups struggling against inequality, discrimination, and exclusion.
Today everyone is the citizen of one or another state. While citizenship entitlement has become universal, unresolved contestations remain regarding: criteria for inclusion and exclusion; rights and duties accompanying citizenship; the citizen’s relation to state and community; the relation of citizenship to freedom and equality; and the civic values that should inform it.
8.2 Significance
The growing significance of citizenship has not resolved its theoretical ambiguity. Key contributors to the concept’s development:
- T.H. Marshall: initially employed citizenship to explain the striving for legal, political, and social rights among excluded groups — especially the working class; connected development of citizen rights to the situations of the bourgeoisie and working classes.
- Bryan Turner: explored the link between social movements, conflicts, and citizenship identity.
- Antony Giddens and Ramesh Misra: drew attention to the deep ambiguity surrounding citizenship rights.
- Janoski: regretted the missing link between citizenship rights and obligations and the absence of micro-studies relating the two.
- Marshall vs. Maslow: wide differences in explaining what drives people towards citizenship ideals — Marshall attributes it to class; Maslow to his hierarchy of needs.
Recent global developments that heightened interest in citizenship:
- Increasing voter apathy and long-term welfare dependency in the West.
- Nationalist and mass movements that brought down bureaucratic socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
- Backlash against welfare regimes in the West and centralised, often one-party regimes in the Third World.
- Demographic shift in the Western world towards multicultural and multiracial social composition.
- Decline of positivism — heightening the significance of choices citizens make discretely and collectively.
India-specific concerns: active citizenship is seen as the need of the hour due to prevalent authoritarianism, lack of accountability of public offices, widespread corruption, intolerance of dissent, violation of fundamental rights, lack of citizens’ grievance redressal, absence of public-spiritedness and transparency.
Galston on qualities required for healthy democracy: willingness to tolerate and work with those who are different; desire to participate in the political process to promote public good and hold authorities accountable; willingness to show self-restraint and exercise personal responsibility in economic demands; commitment to a fair distribution of resources. In their absence, “the ability of liberal societies to function successfully progressively diminishes.”
Key conclusion: mere institutional and procedural devices (separation of powers, bicameral legislature, federalism) will not ensure the health and probity of a polity. Civic virtue and public-spiritedness — integral to citizenship — are also required.
8.3 Nature of Citizenship
Citizenship = membership of a political community with certain rights and obligations broadly acknowledged and shared in common. Membership is both:
- Passive: citizens are entitled to certain rights and obligations without consciously shaping them — associated with limited legal rights and extensive social rights expressing redistributive arrangements; the state plays a major role here.
- Active: involves conscious engagement in civic and political life — highlights citizen-agency, closely linked with democracy and citizen participation.
Citizens possess specific rights which non-citizens (aliens) do not — most states do not grant the right to vote or stand for public office to aliens. Aliens can become naturalised citizens with attendant rights and obligations.
Three dimensions of citizenship rights (derived from T.H. Marshall):
| Dimension | Content | Associated Institutions |
| Civil | Rights necessary for individual freedom: liberty of the person, freedom of speech/thought/faith, right to own property and conclude valid contracts, right to strive for a just order under rule of law; basic civil right in the economic field = right to work | Courts of justice |
| Political | Rights to participate in the exercise of political power: to vote; to seek and support political leadership; to marshal support to just authority; to struggle against unfair political authority | Parliament, electoral institutions |
| Social | Claims involving economic welfare and security; right to share in the social heritage and live the life due to one per prevailing social standards; right to culture — to pursue a distinctive way of life | Educational, social welfare institutions |
Historical trajectory of rights in Europe: civil rights in the 18th century → political rights in the 19th century → social rights in the 20th century. In the colonies, including India, the national movement and the independent regime that followed invoked all three dimensions together.
Citizenship and equality: citizenship invokes a specific equality — it admits quantitative/economic inequalities and cultural differences, but does not admit qualitative inequality in basic claims and obligations. It has an undeniable levelling impact. Key question: can basic equality be created and preserved without invading the freedom of the competitive market?
There is a profound subjective dimension to citizenship — it involves a conscious, reflective, and deliberative agency qualifying personal pursuits with public interests. It is a way of life growing within a person, not something given from outside. Legal perspectives on citizenship therefore have necessary limitations.
8.4 Liberal Democracy, Citizenship and Civic Culture
In liberal democracy, public authority is exercised in the name of free and equal citizens — who in turn rule themselves. The state plays a role in making free and equal citizens through public education and other fora of culture.
Liberal democratic education defines citizens as free and equal individuals who are incidentally members of particular ethnic, class, and religious communities. Liberal democracy treats the hierarchies generated by such communities as irrelevant to the state in its treatment of citizens. Marxists and communitarians have found this understanding idealistic and narrow — it fails to take seriously the embedded nature of citizens.
Civic culture: a specific form of culture pertaining to public life that proposes world-views, ways of life, ideas of nature, and standards of excellence shaping human behaviour and self-understanding. It is created, transformed, and reproduced by processes of persuasion.
- Civic culture offers a normative order ranking and directing citizen activity, but also permits significant spaces for contestation and alternative ways of life — potentially generating a widely plural understanding of citizenship. Therefore, civic culture itself needs to be vetted by the rule of law.
- Civic culture lays down a civic moral ideal based on the standpoint of free and equal individuality.
- However, public education also created its own hierarchies where institutions and disciplines are ranked by their valorisation in the market. The civic culture liberal democracy threw up was therefore profoundly ambivalent.
- Community influence begins at birth through rituals and practices; civic educational processes have their impact relatively late — giving community culture a strong “contravailing edge” over civic culture.
8.5 Marxism and Citizenship
Marxism’s engagement with citizenship is characterised by deep ambivalence:
- Marxism holds that the ideology of the capitalist state recasts class relations as relations between citizens — putting a gloss on the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Rights, justice, and freedom as associated with citizenship thereby become ambivalent.
- For Marxism, the basic social relations in all class-divided societies are class relations — between peasantry and landlords under feudalism, between the working class and bourgeoisie under capitalism. If class relations projected themselves openly as basic, society would be mired in class struggle, exposing the coercive character of the state.
- The ideology of the state contains class struggle by reconstituting social relations as relations between free and equal citizens — corresponding to the surface appearance of equal exchange in the market.
- Louis Althusser (French philosopher): identified the mechanisms through which this ideology is disseminated — public education, media, civic associations, political parties, trade unions, legal and juridical organisations, and sometimes religious organisations — called them the “ideological state apparatuses.”
- State ideology has a real basis — social agents locate their role and place in society through this ideology. The consciousness of agents under capitalism remains primarily consciousness of citizens unless challenged by the contradictions of capitalism.
Marxism’s double critique of liberal citizenship:
- The notion of free and equal citizenship expresses only the superficial face of market-related freedoms — hiding the profound contradictions in which social relations under capitalism are caught.
- Yet, rights and duties associated with citizenship are important and necessary — they can help lay bare the contradictions of capitalist relations and mount struggles to overcome them. Social classes cannot organise themselves if the basic freedoms associated with citizenship are denied.
8.6 Persons and Citizens
Philosophically, human beings are conferred attributes and prerogatives marking them off from other beings — but communities and states have given them little positive consideration unless they are insiders. In modern times, attempts have been made to confer rights on all human beings qua human beings — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is the primary example.
Turner: citizenship rights are “the outcome of social movements that either aim to expand or defend the definition of social membership.” Citizenship is simultaneously an act of inclusion and an act of closure — states are very particular about whom they call citizens.
Hoffman and Janoski identify four categories of persons excluded from citizenship or who had to struggle for inclusion:
| Category | Description |
| Stigmatised Humans | Those suffering social defilement or infirmity — class-based poor, gender-disqualified women, racial/ethnic groups attributed low status, gender-despised homosexual groups. Most common candidates for citizenship; charged by social superiors with inability to fulfil citizenship duties due to narrow interests. Relentless struggles for equal citizenship continue |
| Impaired Humans | From established citizen groups but whose competence to fulfil rights and obligations is questioned due to physical or mental disabilities. The inclusion movement in many countries has brought significant changes |
| Potential Humans | Foetus in the womb, accident victims in permanent coma, unconscious patients, aged citizens who have lost all thought and activity processes. Have rights but obligations can hardly be spoken of |
| Human-like Non-Humans / Quasi-Humans | Nations, ethnic and religious groups endowed with group rights. Also corporations and offices — their corporate rights lead to systematic class and size bias, placing them in contention with free and equal citizenship |
8.7 Group-Differentiated Citizenship
Traditionally, many liberals held citizenship to be a matter of treating people as individuals with equal rights under law — distinguishing democratic citizenship from pre-modern views that determined political status by religious, ethnic, or class membership. However, it is increasingly admitted that mere equal rights may not ensure equal access for culturally different groups. Without safeguards for cultural minorities, equal rights may reinforce majoritarian domination over minorities.
Group-differentiated citizenship qualifies citizenship by cultural belonging — sees citizenship as constituted of both equal rights and differences. A society avowing this approach appreciates the cultural differences in which equal and free citizens are anchored.
Will Kymlicka on the pertinent notion of culture: societal culture — “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.” It is expressed in everyday vocabulary of social life and embodied in common institutions and practices (schools, media, economy, government).
- Kymlicka: “freedom involves making choices amongst various options and our societal culture not only provides these options, but also makes them meaningful to us.”
- Ronald Dworkin: protection of culture from “structural debasement or decay” is necessary.
- Margalit and Raz on cultural endurance: (i) cultural membership provides meaningful options — if a culture decays, options shrink and their pursuit becomes less likely to succeed; (ii) self-identity and recognition by others depend on “criteria of belonging” rather than personal accomplishment — dignity and self-respect are deeply bound up with cultural membership.
Cultures are modes of life more enduring than individual choices. Cultures undergo changes but remain self-same cultures across those changes.
Two types of relationships between citizenship and cultural embeddedness:
8.7.1 Citizenship as an Attribute Independent of Cultural Identity
Citizenship is limited to membership and participation in the political community — it does not aspire to uphold any comprehensive conception of the good life or subscribe to any particular community’s ideals. It may encompass a multiplicity of diverse cultural communities.
In this conception, a citizen is committed to his communitarian identity and moral ideal while simultaneously respecting and acting in concert with fellow citizens whose communitarian identities greatly differ. To move from community membership to this kind of citizenship, a person needs the capacity for freedom — to define oneself independently of one’s specific community of anchor.
This requires a double framework: one appropriate to the community, and one as a citizen extending equal consideration to all. It requires forging civic friendship — not merely an attitude of “live and let live” or benign mutual indifference.
Limitation: this double framework is difficult for those with strong commitments to community ideals. Beliefs and practices alien to deeply held ones can feel deeply threatening — potentially giving rise to parochial, sectarian, exclusivist, authoritarian, and fundamentalist tendencies.
8.7.2 Citizenship as a Group-Differentiated Identity
This perspective places greater stress on group-differentiated identities. Different cultural communities identify and cultivate within their own traditions resources supportive of civic freedom and equality. Citizenship pursuits do not require conversion from one comprehensive way of life to another, but a reordering of community identity itself, given the plurality of community identities.
In this conception, citizenship means different things to different communities — rights and obligations differ, though the principles on which they are grounded are the same: the significance of community for the constitution of the self, and the need to ensure political stability under freedom and equality.
Three types of rights under differentiated citizenship:
(i) Polyethnic Rights: A large number of states are polyethnic. Ethnic groups have challenged demands that they abandon significant aspects of their ethnic heritage and assimilate to mainstream culture. Their demands have included:
- Right to freely express their ethnic heritage without discrimination.
- Changes in educational curriculum; access to music and arts distinctive to them.
- Funding of ethnic associations, magazines, and festivals as part of arts and museums funding.
- Exemption from laws like Sunday closing, animal slaughter legislation, motorcycle helmet laws, official dress codes, and bans on wearing headscarves/turbans.
(ii) Special Representation Rights: Demanded by groups facing systematic disadvantage in the prevailing political process that prevents them from effectively representing their views and interests. In India, Dalits have demanded special representation rights; Adivasis have demanded them along with ethnic rights.
(iii) Self-Government Rights: Most extreme form — tend to divide people into separate political spaces with distinct history, territory, and powers, attributing themselves the status of a separate political community. May make wider citizenship claims secondary.
Liberal criticisms of group-differentiated citizenship:
- Nathan Glazer (American context): encouraging group differences as constitutive of citizenship means “the hope of a larger fraternity of all Americans will have to be abandoned.”
- Cultural/group rights violate the primacy of individual rights.
- Group-differentiated citizenship ceases to be “a device to cultivate a sense of community and a common sense of purpose” — it becomes inherently particularistic and potentially discriminatory.
- If citizenship is differentiated, it no longer provides a shared experience or common status.
- Group-differentiated citizenship requires representation of the group and group leaders rather than citizens themselves.
- May lead to seeking self-determination and liberation through secession — a threat to the state and universal citizenship; may foment civil wars and irreconcilable conflicts.
- Liberals prefer participatory structures allowing greater democratic control over local and regional resource distribution as a better way of empowering excluded groups.
- Group-based claims may erode public-spiritedness and impede integration of minorities and immigrants.
Assessment: most criticisms apply to extreme cases. The primary issue group-differentiated claims raise is whether a group is included within a political community as an equal. Often exclusion and discrimination precipitate self-government claims among people sharing a common territory and culture. Self-determination demands are largely confined to cultural groups claiming a distinct nationhood.
8.8 Summary (Key Takeaways)
- Citizenship = membership of a political community with rights and obligations; it is both passive (entitlements) and active (civic engagement). Three dimensions: civil, political, and social.
- Citizenship has become a central theme in social science literature — driven by voter apathy, collapse of socialist regimes, backlash against welfare states, and multicultural demographic shifts.
- Liberal democracy: civic culture and public education form free and equal citizens — but remain profoundly ambivalent as they create their own hierarchies.
- Marxism: citizenship ideology recasts class relations as citizen relations — a device of capitalist state ideology. Yet citizenship can also activate social agents to critique public institutions. Deep ambivalence.
- Persons vs. citizens: four excluded categories (stigmatised, impaired, potential, quasi-human). Social movements have progressively expanded citizenship to wider groups.
- Group-differentiated citizenship: acknowledges that mere equal rights may reinforce majoritarian domination; proposes polyethnic rights, special representation rights, and self-government rights — but faces liberal criticism for threatening universal, individual-based citizenship.
- The horizon of citizenship today extends beyond nation-states — linked to civil society, participatory democracy, civic responsibility, and the challenges of globalisation.
