How the Rise of National Citizenship Laws Built the Modern State

Anton Gvozdikov/Shutterstock

Commentary

As immigration levels have grown in many Western countries, concerns over the politically destabilizing effects of large-scale migration have prompted a continuing debate over citizenship. As we’ve noted at Mises.org, many European states have consequently moved toward greater restrictions on citizenship. Other states, such as the United States and Canada, have yet to embrace any new limitations on naturalization laws.

One common assumption in all these cases, however, is that it is up to national states to define and regulate citizenship. Even in the United States—allegedly a decentralized, federalist state—it is the central government that controls the levers of citizenship. (It is likely that among Western states, Switzerland is alone in still embracing a significant measure of decentralized naturalization policies.)[1]

This is no accident of history. Rather, today’s centralized citizenship regimes are a product of several centuries of state building efforts that allowed states to establish control and monopoly power over the granting of citizenship. Indeed, the idea of national, territory-based citizenship is characteristic of our era of strong, centralized states. These modern notions of citizenship have helped the state consolidate and expand state power in ways that were unattainable in a time of more localized and diverse citizenship.

Origins in Urban Citizenship

The idea of citizenship, in a very loose sense, dates back to the Mediterranean ancient world. But after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, citizenship in the West came to be associated overwhelmingly with residents of urban areas alone. In agricultural areas, more geared toward feudal arrangements, political status was tied to personal, reciprocal agreements (essentially private contracts) between lords and vassals. The more complex and layered political arrangements in the medieval cities and towns sustained the less personal, but nonetheless localized, idea of urban citizenship.

Citizenship within a town brought its own advantages, such as protection from imprisonment by feudal lords without the permission of town courts, plus “freedom of movement, testation, and inheritance, as well as the freedom to perform any profession.”[2] The medieval aphorism “Stadtluft macht frei” (“urban air makes you free”) was coined for a reason.

Unlike the Greek city-states, however, few of these cities were independent polities unto themselves. They were usually part of kingdoms, ruled by monarchs. Thus, citizenship in a city or town served two essential functions: It allowed for participation in the city’s political life and some level of protection against the monarchs who were incessantly looking to expand taxation and the monarch’s power in general.

Not surprisingly, the ruling classes in the cities jealously guarded their own prerogatives from intervention by the monarchs. Historian Martin van Creveld has explained how the independence and privileges of the towns were “granted not to individuals but to all citizens [in the towns],” who consequently enjoyed some independence from the monarch.

Van Creveld writes: “From the point of view of the would-be centralizing monarchs, the problem that the towns presented was much the same as that posed by the nobility. ... Just as each nobleman was, to some extent, his own lord and exercised power inferior to, but not essentially different from that of the king, so towns had their own organs of government.”[3]

Like the nobility in their regional strongholds, the cities also possessed their own guards to maintain public order and their own armed forces in the form of militias and mercenaries. Thus, the towns possessed the practical means to insulate themselves from the coercive power of the central state.

Note, moreover, that this model separated the idea of citizenship from the “national” or linguistic community. That is, many different types of citizens existed within, say, the Kingdom of France simultaneously. To be “French” did not mean to be a French citizen.

Similar situations existed throughout the many principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, and even in England, which was already relatively centralized by the High Middle Ages. Nationality and citizenship would not become united until the 18th century.

The Rise of Absolutism and the Modern State

As Krzysztof Trzcinski puts it, “the middle ages [sic] became the starting point for later models of state citizenship and the modern theory of personal rights.”[4] Unfortunately, however, with the coming of the early modern period, Europe moved toward a model of citizenship geared around political centralization.

The rise of absolutist monarchs in Europe meant the “progressive twilight of [town] citizenship [and] the state’s gradual takeover of its legal solutions.”[5] These urban citizens became “subjects” of the central state instead. The absolutist monarchies also abolished or greatly restricted the kingdom-wide estate assemblies—e.g., the medieval Cortes in Spain and the Estates General in France—that towns had used to protect themselves from various royal interventions.

Replacing citizenship with national subjecthood nonetheless was a crucial step in creating the new model of consolidated nationwide citizenship.

Trzcinski continues, “Paradoxically, subjecthood—seemingly regressive to the institutions of municipal citizenship—was an important bridge on the way to the building of state citizenship since it weakened the estate and feudal order and defined the state of subordination of individuals to the central authority and at the same time membership in a particular state.”[6]

Contra Trzcinski, however, we might note that this is not really paradoxical. Subjecthood, as imposed by the absolutists, accomplished the larger goal of the state builders: It destroyed the local institutions’ powers to freely determine the legal nature of the legal relationship between individuals and political institutions. This was replaced by central control instead.

The result was far greater control over the individual from the central state. Subjecthood—which gradually became simply citizenship under another name—became “nationalized” through this period. Therefore, citizenship ultimately did as well.

William Safran writes: “In the ancien regime, membership in the nation was defined in terms of a sharing of religion, social relationships, duties, rights (however limited), and cultural patterns. Since these elements were promoted and protected by the state, it came to define the nation, and citizenship and nationality became fused [emphasis added]."[7]

This period also solidified the notion of territorial citizenship. Before the early modern period, citizenship was more a function of relationships. Physical location was only one factor of many in determining one’s relationship with a town government or the monarch. With the rise of the modern state, however, territoriality became a factor of central importance.

Historians Andrew Gordon and Trevor Stack wrote: “Recent research has highlighted the impact of cartography in facilitating a de-socialised conception of space and permitting the erasure of local difference under the imposition of national space. As maps became a significant tool of government, they also played a role in transforming the image of the nation.”[8]

In the new territorial-state ideal, emerging “seemingly out of nowhere” in the 16th century, everything everywhere within the physical territory of the state was to be leveled and all made equally subject to the (theoretically) omnipotent monarch.[9] The idea of centralized subjecthood—and eventually centralized citizenship—followed this general model.

The Role of the French Revolution

As with so much else—i.e., our modern notions of nationalism and democracy—the modern idea of citizenship has been heavily influenced by the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries abolished absolutist subjecthood, but the relationship between the individual and the state was not fundamentally changed. If anything, state power became stronger under the new ideal of citizenship.

Charles Tilly notes that, while the French absolutist monarchs had greatly centralized the state, the French revolutionaries went far beyond this. This new revolutionary model abolished all mediating institutions and instead put each and every individual in a direct relationship with the state.

Tilly writes, “Strong citizenship depends on direct rule: imposition throughout a unified territory of a relatively standard system in which an effective hierarchy of state officials reaches from the national center into individual localities or even households, thence back to the center.”[10]

This can be better understood when we remember that the French revolutionaries were fundamentally extreme nationalists. In this model, all institutions—in a radical break from the medieval past of decentralized polities—were now to be directly subject to the central state.

Tilly continues, “Strong nationalism insists that citizens’ rights and obligations take priority over those attached to other ties in which citizens are engaged.”[11]

These notions spread outward from France through the revolutionary wars and through the spread of French-inspired political ideology. As Tilly reminds us, thanks to French domination of the continent during the revolutionary years, “almost all European states converged on direct rule and the elaboration of citizenship at a national scale.”[12]

The Ideological Benefits (to the State) of National Citizenship

This relationship between direct rule and citizenship flows in both directions. Imposing national citizenship from the center requires a strong central state, but the idea of citizenship itself serves an important propaganda function that strengthens the state in return.

As Murray Rothbard notes in “Anatomy of the State,” state control cannot be maintained by coercive force alone. It must be augmented by propaganda designed to convince the public that it ought to voluntarily submit itself to the state. As states asserted greater control over all their territories and abolished local citizenship, it was necessary to solidify these efforts by promoting the idea of national citizenship or subjecthood. Moreover, no competition to this national identity was to be tolerated.

States and their propagandists from the 16th century to the 19th century successfully connected the idea of citizenship to new emerging notions of nationalism. The stage had been set for converting citizenship into a tool for centralizing state power. The phrase “I’m German” became largely synonymous with “I’m a German citizen” and decisively not “I am German but a citizen of Hamburg.”

The benefits to the state have been undeniable. The centralizers shrewdly employed the spread of national citizenship as a means of expanding state control over wealth and personnel across a vast territory. After all, the new citizenship came with many obligations to the state itself. It is true that town citizenship also came with obligations—such as taxation and militia service—but those were more easily identifiable with one’s specific community and personal needs. The benefits conferred on the individual by national citizenship were far more abstract, and often purely theoretical.

The obligations of national citizenship, on the other hand, have always been all too real. In the French context, national citizenship meant more taxation, and it also crucially meant subjection to national conscription. The warmaking capability of national states expanded many times over with the expansion of national citizenship.

The US Experience

A similar evolution has occurred in the United States, albeit on a condensed timescale. In the United States’ legal origins, the so-called Founders did not create national citizenship at all.

Historian Wang Xi writes: “The usages of the word ‘citizen’/‘citizens’ in the Constitution indicated that citizenship was primarily defined by the state constitution or governments. Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the Constitution gave definition to national citizenship.

“The Articles of Confederation provided that citizens of one state were entitled to enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens of other states. The Constitution simply borrowed the sentence and made no effort to define national citizenship. The Constitution established a stronger and more powerful federal government, but it left to the states the power to grant citizenship and to regulate the rights attached to citizens.”[13]

In practice, this initial vision of citizenship began to fade almost immediately. Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. state, thanks in part to the growth of direct federal rule in the frontier territories, created the idea of national citizenship independent of state citizenship. As federal power grew, it became increasingly easy to contemplate citizenship independent of the states themselves.

Moreover, citizenship in the United States—which, in its early years, was functionally little more than British subjecthood under a new name—lacked the strong connections to historical institutions or long-settled places. Citizenship in the United States was largely an ideological construct, giving it much in common with the abstract and functional type of citizenship favored by the French Jacobins.[14]

Not surprisingly, this ultimately led to the abolition of member-state-level control over citizenship with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Today, the only debate is over what powers the national legislature has in regulating citizenship.

The decline of local citizenship has paralleled the growth of state power in other policy areas. In the 19th century, the central government was greatly limited in its powers to impose either direct taxation or direct conscription. By the early 20th century, the central U.S. state was able to grasp new powers and introduce direct taxation—via a national income tax. This was followed by the first federally-administered mass conscription program during World War I.

By then, the transformation and centralization of U.S. self-identity had been completed: The phrase “I’m an American” became synonymous with “I’m a citizen of the United States.” By the mid-20th century, it was clear that virtually no one cared about state-level citizenship anymore.

In the United States, as in Europe, the advent of national citizenship status has mirrored and fueled the growth and centralization of state power overall.

Could this process ever go into reverse? It is possible, of course, and it is easy enough to imagine the existence of national states without national citizenship. It’s happened before. National states could simply tax their constituent cities and member states. Exactly how these localities obtain the tax revenue demanded of them could be decided locally by local citizens.

This does not require a direct relationship between the central state and individuals. It does not require national or uniform citizenship. Experience has shown, however, that in practice, direct rule of the population tends to yield greater benefits for the state itself. Moreover, centralized control of national citizenship helps extinguish loyalties and attachments to other institutions outside the state. Consequently, the social, political, and ideological power of the idea of national citizenship is too important for central states to easily abandon.

References:

[1] The Swiss federal government exercises some regulatory power over cantonal naturalization powers. But Swiss cantons are the primary agents of naturalization, and some cantons have more stringent naturalization requirements than others.

[2] Krzysztof Trzcinski, “Citizenship in Europe: The Main Stages of Development of the Idea and Institution,” Studia Europejskie—Studies in European Affairs 25, no. 1, (2021): 13.

[3] Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (New York: Cambridge, 1999), p. 104.

[4] Trzcinski, “Citizenship in Europe,” p. 14.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 15.

[7] William Safran, “Citizenship and Nationality in Democratic Systems: Approaches to Defining and Acquiring Membership in the Political Community,” International Political Science Review 18, no. 3 (Jul. 1997): 315

[8] Andrew Gordon and Trevor Stack, “Citizenship Beyond the State: Thinking with Early Modern Citizenship in the Contemporary World,” Citizenship Studies 11, no.2 (May 2007):121

[9] Ibid.

[10] Charles Tilly, “The Emergence of Citizenship in France and Elsewhere,” International Review of Social History 40, Supplement 3 (1995): 228

[11] Ibid., p. 232.

[12] Ibid., p. 131.

[13] Wang Xi, “Citizenship and Nation-Building in American History and Beyond,” Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 2 (2010): 7020.

[14] Safran, “Citizenship and Nationality in Democratic Systems,” p. 317. Safran writes: “In its functional-voluntary orientation, the political-ideological American approach to citizenship was ‘Jacobin’ as well, and perhaps even more so than the French one.”

From Mises.org

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.