How National Citizenship Built the Modern State
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 here 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 decentralist naturalization policy.)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”) had been coined for a reason.
Unlike the Greek city-states, however, few of these cities were independent polities unto themselves. These were usually part of kingdoms, ruled by monarchs. Thus, citizenship in a city or town served two essential functions: it allowed for political participation in the city’s political life, and citizenship offered 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 explains 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 continues:
[F]rom 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 through 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 eighteenth century.
The Rise of Absolutism and the Modern State
As Krzysztof Trzciński 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—which 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. Trzciński 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 Trzciński, 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
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
