A citizen is a person formally recognized by a political community as one of its members, entitled to specific rights and bound by corresponding obligations. The concept traces back to ancient Greek city-states, and it has been expanding, contracting, and reinventing itself for roughly 2,500 years. What sounds like a simple legal label turns out to be one of the most contested ideas in politics, philosophy, and everyday life.
Where the Idea Came From
Citizenship as a concept was unknown in the older empires of the ancient Near East, where people were subjects of a ruler rather than members of a political community. It emerged in the Greek world as something genuinely new: the idea that a specific group of people held shared authority over the governance of their city-state. In Athens, citizens could vote in the assembly, serve on juries, and hold office. But Athenian citizenship was extremely narrow. Women, enslaved people, and foreign-born residents were all excluded, no matter how long they lived there. Being a citizen meant being a free adult male born to citizen parents.
Rome expanded the idea dramatically. Roman citizenship could be extended to conquered peoples and freed slaves, making it a tool of empire-building rather than just a birthright of one city. By the time Emperor Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 CE, nearly every free person in the Roman Empire held citizenship. That move was partly pragmatic: more citizens meant more taxpayers. But it also showed how flexible the concept could be. The same word, “citizen,” covered an Athenian farmer debating war policy in the assembly and a Syrian merchant paying taxes to Rome. Those two experiences of citizenship had almost nothing in common except the label.
How Most People Become Citizens
About 97 percent of the world’s population acquires citizenship simply by being born.1Regulation & Governance. Explaining the birthright citizenship lottery: Longitudinal and cross‐national evidence for key determinants The two main pathways are tied to Latin legal terms that still shape immigration policy everywhere. The first, jus soli (“right of the soil”), grants citizenship based on where you are born. If you are born in a country that follows this rule, you are a citizen of that country regardless of your parents’ nationality. The second, jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), grants citizenship based on who your parents are. If your parents are citizens of a country, you inherit that citizenship no matter where in the world you happen to be born.
In practice, most countries blend these principles rather than relying on one alone. Jus soli is more common in the Americas and parts of Asia and Oceania, while jus sanguinis dominates in Europe, much of Asia, and parts of Africa. But the lines are blurry. Some jus soli countries impose conditions: Cambodia and Thailand, for instance, may require legal residence before birthright citizenship kicks in. Some Middle Eastern countries limit birthright claims to children whose fathers were themselves born in the territory. And an increasing number of nations use hybrid systems that draw on both principles.2The Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Series “Law”. FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE INSTITUTION OF CITIZENSHIP: JUS SOLI AND JUS SANGUINIS
Which system a country uses has real consequences. Under pure jus sanguinis, a family can live in a country for generations without their children automatically becoming citizens. Under pure jus soli, a child born during a brief visit to a country becomes a citizen of that country. Neither approach is obviously “right,” and the tensions between them drive some of the most heated immigration debates in the world.
Naturalization and the Gates It Requires You to Pass
For the small percentage of people who don’t receive citizenship at birth, naturalization is the usual path. This means applying to become a citizen of a country where you already live, typically after meeting residency requirements, demonstrating ties to the community, and passing some form of test.
Language testing is one of the most widespread gatekeeping tools. Many countries require applicants to prove they can speak the official language during a naturalization interview or a standardized exam.3International Journal of Bilingualism. Naturalization language testing and its basis in ideologies of national identity and citizenship The idea behind these tests is that a shared language is part of what holds a national community together. Critics argue that the tests often reflect idealized notions of national identity more than practical necessity, and that they can permanently shut out certain groups of immigrants, particularly older adults, people with limited formal education, and refugees who had little opportunity to learn the language before arrival.
Germany offers a useful case study. Before 2000, German naturalization law was heavily based on descent, making it difficult for long-term foreign residents to become citizens. When the law changed, Germany introduced formalized language and civics tests to replace informal interviews with local officials. The Netherlands followed a similar path. In both countries, the stated goal was uniformity and fairness: a standardized test rather than the subjective judgment of a local bureaucrat. But research has shown that these tests can create a permanent underclass of residents who live, work, and pay taxes in a country but remain excluded from full membership.4Ethnicities. Deserving citizenship in Germany and The Netherlands. Citizenship tests in liberal democracies
What Citizens Actually Get, and What They Owe
Citizenship is a package deal. The specific contents vary by country, but the general structure is consistent: a bundle of rights you receive and a set of obligations you accept.
On the rights side, citizens typically enjoy protections that non-citizens in the same country may not. These include:
- Political participation: The right to vote in elections, run for office, and serve on juries. In most democracies, these are reserved for citizens.
- Unrestricted residence: A citizen cannot be deported from their own country. Non-citizens, even long-term legal residents, can be.
- Consular protection: When traveling abroad, citizens can seek help from their country’s embassies and consulates.
- Full access to public services: Some government benefits, employment in certain sectors, and eligibility for specific programs may be restricted to citizens.
On the obligations side, citizens may be required to pay taxes (though non-citizens usually must too), serve on juries, perform military service where conscription exists, and obey the laws of the state. The balance between rights and obligations is where most of the philosophical argument happens.
Two Philosophies That Shape the Debate
When people argue about what citizenship should mean, they’re often drawing on one of two intellectual traditions without realizing it. The liberal tradition, broadly speaking, treats citizenship as a set of individual rights. You are free as long as nobody interferes with your choices. The state’s job is to protect that freedom and otherwise leave you alone. Under this view, a good citizen is someone who respects others’ rights and follows the law.
The republican tradition (small “r,” nothing to do with political parties) sees things differently. Republicans argue that freedom isn’t just the absence of interference; it’s the absence of domination. You can be unfree even if nobody is actively bothering you, as long as someone has the power to interfere with you at will. A benevolent monarch who happens to leave you alone still dominates you, because nothing stops them from changing their mind.5Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Liberal and Republican Freedom Under this view, active political participation isn’t optional; it’s the mechanism that prevents domination. A good citizen doesn’t just follow the law; they help make the law.
These competing visions play out in real policy. Countries that lean liberal tend to have thinner requirements for citizens: pay your taxes, don’t break the law, and vote if you feel like it. Countries influenced by republican thinking tend to make citizenship more demanding: mandatory voting in Australia, universal military service in countries like Israel and South Korea, and strong civic education requirements for naturalization.
Holding More Than One Passport
For most of modern history, states treated citizenship as exclusive. You belonged to one country. Holding a second citizenship was seen as a sign of divided loyalty, and many countries required immigrants to formally renounce their previous citizenship before naturalizing. That expectation has eroded significantly. Over recent decades, dual nationality has increased rapidly worldwide, and more states tolerate or actively permit it.6International Migration Review. Dual Citizenship as a Path-Dependent Process
The shift happened for several reasons. Mass migration made it impractical to demand that millions of people sever ties with their birth country. Jus sanguinis countries found it increasingly awkward to strip citizenship from people whose only “offense” was also acquiring citizenship elsewhere. And a growing number of governments recognized that diaspora communities remain economically and politically connected to their country of origin, making forced renunciation counterproductive.
The tolerance is uneven, though. Some countries, like Mexico and Ireland, actively encourage dual citizenship. Others, like Japan and China, still prohibit it and may revoke citizenship from people who naturalize elsewhere. The result is a patchwork: depending on the specific combination of countries involved, one person might comfortably hold three passports while another is forced to choose.
Who Was Historically Shut Out
If citizenship is defined as full membership in a political community, then for most of history most people were not truly citizens. The formal barriers were explicit and openly defended.
Gender is the most universal example. Women were systematically excluded from core citizenship rights across nearly every society. Australian women were among the first in the world to receive the right to vote, yet it took until 1997 before they had full equality in jury service. The resistance wasn’t always about grand ideology; it sometimes came down to logistics that reflected deeper assumptions about women’s place. Debates over women’s jury duty in Australia raised concerns about jurors being “locked up overnight” in mixed company, or “ladies” being forced into a jury box with “undesirables,” or the simple fact that no one had built women’s restroom facilities in courthouses.7Gender & History. Accommodating Women: Geographies of Citizenship in the Twentieth‐Century Campaign for Women’s Jury Rights The physical infrastructure of citizenship was literally built for men.
Indigenous peoples present a different kind of exclusion. In settler-colonial states, indigenous groups often held a complicated dual status: technically citizens of the nation-state that had been built on their lands, but also members of distinct political communities with their own governance traditions. In Canada, the Nisga’a First Nation pursued a form of differentiated citizenship, arguing that their rights flow not from the Canadian state but from their relationship to their own lands and their identity as a pre-existing political community. They challenged the idea that the state is the sole source of citizenship rights and negotiated a treaty that realigned the relationship between their indigenous identity and Canadian citizenship.8American Ethnologist. Differentiating indigenous citizenship: Seeking multiplicity in rights, identity, and sovereignty in Canada Cases like this push back against the assumption that citizenship must be singular and state-centered.
Citizenship at a Distance
One of the more striking developments in recent decades is the extension of citizenship rights to people who live far from the country they belong to. Since 1990, over 100 countries have extended voting rights to citizens abroad, enfranchising roughly 200 million voters around the world.9International Political Science Review. Diaspora voting: A new item on the ‘menu of manipulation’? Diaspora voting reflects the reality that national borders and citizens no longer overlap neatly. Millions of people live in one country while remaining legal members of another, and governments increasingly want to maintain ties to those communities, whether out of democratic principle, economic interest, or both.
This creates complications. A citizen who has lived abroad for decades may vote in elections whose outcomes they will never personally experience. Critics worry that diaspora voting can be exploited by governments seeking to manipulate electoral results, particularly in countries with weak democratic institutions. Supporters counter that citizenship is citizenship regardless of geography, and that stripping voting rights from people who happen to be abroad undermines the principle that membership in a political community is not conditional on physical presence.
Citizenship Beyond the Nation-State
The word “citizen” increasingly shows up in contexts that have nothing to do with passports or government IDs. Some of these extensions are metaphorical; others carry real weight.
Urban citizenship is one example. Cities have become sites where people make claims on resources, rights, and belonging that don’t map neatly onto national citizenship categories. Undocumented immigrants may have no national citizenship rights but participate actively in the life of their city, send children to local schools, and depend on municipal services. Some scholars argue that urban citizenship offers a more grounded, community-oriented framework than national citizenship. Others caution that celebrating urban citizenship without examining its limits glosses over the ways city-level belonging can be fragmented and uneven.10International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims
Digital citizenship is a newer frontier. The term refers to the norms of responsible behavior in online spaces, but it also describes the way digital platforms have become arenas for political participation. Research suggests that people who engage more actively in digital civic life tend to hold stronger democratic orientations, show greater political tolerance, and express more support for participatory governance.11Journal of Public Affairs. Digital Citizenship and Political Culture: How Digital Civic Engagement Shapes Political Orientations in Erbil, Iraq Whether digital engagement causes those orientations or simply attracts people who already hold them is harder to pin down, but the pattern is consistent enough to matter.
Corporate citizenship extends the metaphor further. The term describes the idea that businesses, as actors within a political community, have obligations that go beyond generating profit. When a company pollutes a river, underpays workers, or lobbies to weaken consumer protections, it’s exercising power within that community. The framework of corporate citizenship holds that this power carries responsibilities analogous to those of individual citizens.12Business Ethics. Framing Business Ethics Corporate Responsibility, Stakeholders, and Citizenship
Ecological Citizenship and Rights for Nature
Perhaps the most radical expansion of the citizenship concept in recent years is ecological citizenship. Traditional citizenship draws boundaries around who counts as a member of the political community, and those boundaries have always been limited to living humans. Ecological citizenship challenges this by arguing that future generations and natural entities should be included in the community of rights-holders.
The distinction matters. “Environmental citizenship,” as some scholars use the term, stays within familiar territory: citizens have procedural rights to clean air, clean water, and a say in environmental decisions. It adds environmental concerns to the existing citizenship framework without fundamentally changing it. “Ecological citizenship” goes further. It frames obligations as extending beyond any contract between living people, reaching forward in time to future generations and outward to non-human nature. Several countries have experimented with giving legal personhood to rivers, forests, or ecosystems, a step that makes the abstract idea of ecological citizenship surprisingly concrete.13MOJ Eco Environmental Sciences. The rights of Nature: the legal revolution of the 21st century
Whether you find this persuasive or absurd probably depends on how you answer a more basic question: is citizenship something that exists only between a person and a state, or is it a broader way of describing what it means to be a responsible member of a community? The word has been stretching since Athens, and there’s no sign it has finished stretching yet.
The Feeling of Being a Citizen
Legal citizenship and the subjective experience of being a citizen don’t always line up. You can hold a passport and feel no particular connection to the country that issued it. You can lack legal citizenship entirely and feel deeply rooted in the community where you live. The gap between the legal fact and the psychological reality is something political scientists call “psychological citizenship”: the internal sense that you belong to and identify with a political community.
This sense of belonging depends heavily on feeling a shared identity with other members of the community, whether that community is defined nationally, locally, or in some other way. When people feel that their community recognizes and values them, citizenship feels like something real and meaningful. When they feel excluded, discriminated against, or invisible, the legal document can feel hollow. Immigrant communities often describe this disconnect: you pass the test, take the oath, and receive the certificate, and still feel like an outsider in the country that just claimed you as its own. Understanding citizenship as a psychological experience, not just a legal status, helps explain why fights over belonging feel so personal even when the formal rules seem clear.