CITIZENSHIP.

The construction of Europe as a political entity started immediately after World War II, motivated by the belief that only creation of a genuinely European citizenship would put a definitive end to the violence and atrocities that had ravaged the old continent throughout its history. As of 2005 the European Union (EU) included twenty-five nations that maintain peaceful relations among themselves. Europe has thus attained the first and principal objective of its foundational figures. However, a consensus exists that the EU has not yet become a real political community. Most of its inhabitants do not consider themselves "citizens of Europe." A major reason for this is the fact that the leaders of the principal member-states do not always agree on the type of citizenship to be promulgated. Since the nineteenth century, each nation has developed differently and created its own definition of citizenship. The past still weighs on the present, obstructing reflection and action on the part of those who militate on behalf of a politically unified Europe.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE

World War I may be considered a turning point in the history of European citizenship. In destroying the old empires and consolidating the ascendancy of nation-states, it represented the beginning of the new era. But the war also marked the outcome of a long historical process that occupied peoples and nations during the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, indeed, each nation created its own vocabulary to express the concept. To translate the English word citizenship, French offers a choice of two words: citoyenneté and nationalité. The same is true for the German language, with Bürgerschaft and Staatsangehörigkeit. Like other Latin languages, French uses nationalité to designate both the common origin of inhabitants and the concept of state affiliation, while English and German employ two different terms to more clearly differentiate these two notions.

The history of nations explains these linguistic differences. In England, the wealthy landowners, in contesting the arbitrary character of the monarchy, had obtained the right to appoint their parliamentary representatives. In that country, the concept of citizenship was associated from the start with defense of individual liberties and with obtaining new rights, but it did not call into question the oath of allegiance of the "subjects of His Majesty." With reference to this specific case in Citizenship and Social Class (1950), the political scientist Thomas Humphrey Marshall (1893–1981) proposed a definition that remains famous and is still discussed in textbooks in the early twenty-first century. Emphasizing the gradual enlargement of rights granted to citizens, he suggested that in the wake of the civil and political rights obtained during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the second part of the twentieth century marked the start of a new phase, based on the emergence of social rights granted by the welfare state.

Marshall's view, however, did not take into account individual histories of the other major European states. The French definition of citizenship was profoundly influenced by the Revolution of 1789. In that country Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1778) conception prevailed. In his Contrat social (Social contract) in 1762, Rousseau criticized the English for not sufficiently or carefully enough separating political and civil rights. Taking Athens as his model, Rousseau believed that citizenship should be defined by active participation in the life of the state. He advocated replacing monarchies with republics that were defined as sovereign communities, the members of which submit to the laws of the state, as subjects, but also as citizens who collectively contribute to the development of laws and legislation. Rousseau's influence explains why the French often approached the concept of citizenship from the perspective of participation in the nation's political life, and for a long time they were preoccupied with determining who should belong to this civic community and who must be excluded. The struggles of workers' movements and feminists to extend the right to vote to the lower classes and to women should be viewed in this context.

History also explains the distinctive vocabulary for German citizenship. While in France and England the monarchic state had imposed sovereign power over all its subjects since the seventeenth century, the German Holy Roman Empire, first adumbrated by Charlemagne (r. 768–814), had collapsed in the Middle Ages, leading to a multitude of separate states and principalities. In this context, the monarchic state's first priority was to impose its law upon all its subjects. This was why the Prussian king, Frederick William II (r. 1786–1797), enforced the Allgemeines Landrecht (General State Law) in 1794. The nobility consented to obey this code but, in exchange, the king acknowledged they enjoyed privileges and continued to place heavy burdens on the peasants. Principles of citizenship such as individual liberty and equality, as a consequence, took hold only slowly in the German states. The bourgeoisie, as the class that included individuals who benefited from the droit de cité, or citizenship rights accorded city-dwellers, played a major role in this emancipation process. It is no accident that German is the only European language in which the terms for citizen and bourgeois are virtually synonyms.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the German vocabulary for citizenship acquired a new word, Volkstum. Philosophers, who were intellectuals drawn mostly from the upper class, had greeted the French Revolution in 1789 with enthusiasm. However, occupation of German territories by Napoleon's army forced the Germans to revolt against French domination. From that point on the battle for freedom was no longer a struggle against an arbitrary power and privileged class (the nobility), but also a fight to emancipate an oppressed nation. Henceforth it was not enough to know who was a citizen and who was not. Nations must now define themselves and set out criteria by which they could be identified and distinguished each from the another. One fruit of this effort was Volkstum, a word invented by the philosopher Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) to designate the "national character" of a people by applying three criteria—language, custom, and, most important of all, "the vital impulse," defined as the "spiritual principle" that stamps a nation as unique. French writers and historians of the Romantic period (1820–1840) agreed with and endorsed this definition. They translated Volkstum with a new French word, nationalité, in hopes of clarifying France's own particular characteristics.

During this period the "principle of nationality" became popular throughout Europe. It legitimized the struggles for national sovereignty for which small groups of militants were fighting. The defeat of the Revolutions of 1848 brought about brutal repression of these subversive movements. But they continued to gather strength in the decades that followed, attacking the power of old empires from within. This would be one of the chief causes of World War I.

At this time, in the German language, another word, Staatsangehörigkeit, appeared; it designated citizenship not by allegiance to a nation but rather to a state. Prussian civil servants first employed the term in the context of arguments with neighboring countries concerning measures to control vagrancy and begging. The Prussian state, wishing to care only for its own poor, passed a law in 1842 that more clearly defined which individuals would benefit from its protection. The law specified that the legal status of the Prussian subject was transmitted by paternity from father to child. Thus, Prussia relied on the jus sanguinis (right of blood), which had been used in 1804 by the Napoleonic Civil Code to specify French status and which was later adopted by most European countries. The noteworthy exception was England; that country remained faithful to the feudal principle of the jus soli (right of territory), by which birth within a state confers nationality.

THE POLITICAL STAKES

Until the end of the nineteenth century citizenship and nationality were viewed from two different angles. Philosophers and political activists were principally concerned with what it meant to belong to a nation or a people, while magistrates and bureaucrats were interested in the problem of who belongs to a state. The years between 1880 and 1914 were a vital period in the history of citizenship because these two concerns were ever more closely linked. Workers gradually won the right to vote and various social rights. But, at the same time, governments obliged citizens to enlist in the military and do battle for their nation.

Given these circumstances, one can understand why the right to citizenship became a major political issue. Increasing migration and a terrible economic depression beginning in the mid-1870s provoked the government to intervene in social matters. Most European countries passed laws on immigration and citizenship that revealed a protectionist impulse in public policy-making. Such laws established strict lines of demarcation that separated nationals, who benefited from them, and foreigners, who did not. Citizenship laws also enabled nations to increase their populations by turning foreigners into citizens by a wave of a judicial magic wand. At a time when a nation's power was still measured by the number of soldiers it could enlist in its military, no state was prepared to deprive itself of this resource. By contrast, because leaders were ever more concerned by citizens' loyalty to their nation, the right of citizenship also functioned to exclude those suspected of not sharing the feeling that they belonged to the national community.

These new laws regarding citizenship, which would remain in force through the rest of the twentieth century, must be above all understood as instruments in the service of state power. Arguments used to justify them were often found in the writings of philosophers and historians. But governments used such arguments only if they served their interests. The case of Switzerland clearly revealed that linguistic or religious criteria were not employed to define citizenship when the powers that be judged them inopportune. The notion of "Swiss citizenship" entered the legal vocabulary during a constitutional revision in 1874. From that point on, only the Helvetian confederation could decide on the rules pertaining to political and civic matters insofar as they applied to the Swiss themselves. However, the droit de cité communal, a retention from the ancien régime, remained a determining factor in acquiring citizenship. Anyone who did not enjoy its privileges was considered a "stateless person" (heimatlose).

The major issue that brought about citizenship reform in France in 1889 was concern over the declining birthrate. Since the 1860s France has been a destination for immigrants. The republican regime wanted to avoid the formation of ethnic minorities; the army needed new soldiers. In Algeria French colons wished to reinforce discrimination against the local population but they also wanted to prevent Italian and Spanish immigrants from becoming a majority. This led the government to grant greater importance to the droit du sol (citizenship for all those born on French soil with at least one parent born in France) as a way to convert those born on national soil into French citizens.

Germany was unique in that it was a destination for immigrants, including a large Polish community in eastern Prussia, and at the same time a country of emigration, with some 3.5 million Germans in other countries. The main goal of the German citizenship law voted in 1913, known as the Delbrück Law, was to reinforce the bond of nationality beyond the country's borders. Individuals born of German parents were to be considered German citizens. Contrary to what was often claimed, such a reinforcement of the jus sanguinis did not represent the wish to apply a "German conception" of the nation. Rather, the law aimed to better protect the interests of a country losing inhabitants to emigration at a moment when receiving countries were striving to "nationalize" the foreign population within their borders. In 1891, for example, Brazil decided that all immigrants living on its soil were henceforth Brazilian citizens, unless they expressed the wish to retain their former nationality. As early as 1912 Italy also reinforced the jus sanguinis, allowing all native Italians living abroad to retain their original citizenship.

The legal status of individuals thus became, during the years preceding World War I, a central issue that constituted a form of rivalry among nations. These laws not only demarcated a rigid boundary between the national and foreign populations but also fomented discrimination within the national population as a whole by establishing a variety of intermediate categories of individuals who were denied full citizenship, such as women, stateless persons, naturalized citizens, natives of the colonies, and others.

Another reason that right of citizenship became a major problem was that the fact of belonging to a nation was not only a judicial issue. During this period bureaucracy had made major strides. The state intruded ever more deeply into all the spheres of daily life of its citizens. Everywhere in Europe bureaucrats accomplished the huge task of creating systems of identification and thorough and precise registers of citizenship. This was the era that saw the first modern identity papers and population census reports, from which statistics could be extracted and maps created to reveal the ethnic composition and distribution of the populations.

WORLD WAR I AND THE "PEOPLES' RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION"

During World War I citizenship and nationality were connected in a highly repressive way. Passage of the Delbrück Law a few months before hostilities began was perceived in France and England as a warlike act that aimed to destabilize other European countries by seeking support from German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants. This was the reason why, with the beginning of the war, foreign nationals from those countries were confined in internment camps. Similarly, the Allies adopted laws refusing citizenship to immigrants from enemy countries. These decisions, justified by the war, remained in force during the next several decades. In France the law of denaturalization would later be used against previously naturalized communist activists. Internment would also be applied during World War II, including the detention of Germans fleeing Nazi persecution.

In 1854, at the time of the Crimean War, Napoleon III (r. 1852–1870) had refused to imprison the numerous Russians then living in France, contending that he was at war with princes, not people. This kind of reasoning could no longer apply after the principles of citizenship were established because each citizen is considered a representative of his or her nation. After World War I this logic spread to the whole of Europe. It is estimated that the peace treaties signed in 1919–1920 affected the citizenship of about one hundred million individuals. A change of such magnitude had not occurred since the Napoleonic era. "Peoples' right to self-determination," officially proclaimed in January 1918 by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), became a bedrock of international law. In the name of the "principle of nationalities," the great powers became the supreme arbitrators for determining which groups "really" constituted a nation and which did not, based on ethnic, linguistic, or religious criteria—which, in fact, those nations had never themselves respected in the course of their own histories. Considering the extraordinary diversity of populations living in eastern Europe and the Balkans, these criteria could only be applied in an arbitrary way. Groups that could not obtain the status of sovereign nation became "minorities" with rights guaranteed by the League of Nations, but the new nation-states considered them to be threats to their integrity. The principle of national homogeneity, legitimized by the great powers, fueled tensions that led to armed conflicts, notably between Greece and Turkey in 1919–1922. Massive population transfers occurred in the Balkans and in Asia and were most often enforced without taking into account the will of those involved.

The totalitarian parties that came to power between the two world wars followed to extremes the logic of belonging to a state and the concept of national homogeneity that had been created in the nineteenth century. The Bolsheviks, Italian Fascists, and Nazis each adopted laws of denationalization to be used against enemies of the regime. In Germany laws depriving Jews of the protection of the German state created a "legal" framework for the persecutions and thereby inaugurated a process that led to the Holocaust. Unlike British or French legislation that applied only to individuals guilty of treason, the Nazi laws were applied collectively and based on racist criteria that principally targeted Jews. The Reich Citizenship Law of 15 September 1939 stipulated that henceforth only nationals of "German blood" were to be considered citizens of the Reich. Anti-Semitic laws adopted in France by the Vichy government during World War II employed the same logic. Similarly, totalitarian regimes justified massive population transfers with arguments about homogeneity of the peoples as an extension of the principle of nationalities. This was why, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has emphasized, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was a "Wilsonian nationalist" when he organized the transfer of Germans living abroad to Germany as well as when he decided to eliminate the Jews. Nevertheless, one must not forget that the Allies stood up for "peoples' right to self-determination" as a means to favor peace and put an end to ethnic clashes, while the Nazi regime applied its policies of homogeneity to physically eliminate millions of people.

What made the Stalinist Soviet Union unique with regard to the physical extermination of civilians was its supposed universal destiny and project for constructing a worker's state. Social and economic arguments, rather than ethnic categories, were used to justify mass repression, such as the elimination of the kulaks (wealthy peasants). The fifteen republics that constituted the Soviet Union represented as many "nations," each with its own territory, language and, at least in theory, a significant measure of autonomy. After 1932 nationality defined in ethnocultural terms became an element in the personal identity of everyone in the Soviet Union, and was duly so registered by official census reports. This institutionalization of nationality would seriously fuel the violence that erupted after the collapse of the Soviet regime in the early 1990s. The same process could be observed in other communist countries, notably in Yugoslavia.

EMERGENCE OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP

The establishment of principles of national citizenship thus may be viewed as a series of missteps that in a sense facilitated the tragic paroxysms of Nazi barbarism and the horror of World War II. As soon as peace returned, consequently, there were numerous international initiatives to establish durable and definitively pacific relations between peoples. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, is among the most appealing demonstrations of this collective effort to support the emergence of a universal citizenship. Establishment of the European Union was undertaken with the same basic rationale, even though the various nations did not renounce their sovereignty. On the contrary, it is most striking that postwar citizenship laws adopted by the European states extended their own traditions. The West Germans continued to abide by the Delbrück Law and by the jus sanguinis, because, according to them, inhabitants were still Germans even if living in another sovereign land. In the same way, the United Kingdom retained the right of soil and all people within the empire were granted Britain citizenship and were subjects of the Crown. France, which became one of the principal destinations for immigrants between the two world wars, reinforced the principles built into its 1889 citizenship law.

However, in the postwar decades, citizenship legislation in the various European nations gradually converged. Two reasons explain this phenomenon. The first involved the integration of nations in the European Union. This was accomplished, to be sure, more by creating a large common market than by the construction of a genuine political union. However, elimination of the customs duties was one step in a process that finally enabled people to circulate freely within the European Union—a decision taken by the several states that signed the Schengen treaty in Luxembourg in 1985. Borders separating nations now designated their interior limits while the real boundaries that protect European space moved to the perimeter of the Union. European citizenship was reinforced in 1992 by the Maastricht Treaty, signed in the Netherlands, which granted citizens of one EU nation the right to live and work in another member nation, and in certain cases even vote in local elections. Another essential element in the process of integration was the adoption of a single currency in 2002. Money had long been a fundamental component of state sovereignty and an essential factor in identifying citizens as belonging to a specific national community. The relative ease with which Europeans accepted the euro was a genuine victory over the past. The final element in the progress of European citizenship concerns the judicial and administrative spheres. Even if unaware of it, Europeans in the early twenty-first century abide by laws that were established, in most cases, by high-ranking civil servants of the European Commission in Brussels, by elected members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and by members of the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

However, until the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has not been possible to create a common accord that would regulate European citizenship. Not all authors agree as to the reasons for this stumbling block. Many think that citizenship expresses one's national identity, so that the past still weighs too heavily on the present to allow the major European states to agree, now or in a near future. But other researchers, on the contrary, believe that nothing, in principle, should prevent a unified law of citizenship. Most European nations have become destination countries for immigrants. However, in the modern world, governments cannot allow the constant multiplication, generation after generation, of great numbers of individuals who do not "belong" to their nations. Since the 1970s most European governments have thus modified their right to citizenship in a way that most resembled the system that France, the oldest of the immigrant-destination nations, adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. This system, while based on the jus sanguinis, still leaves an important place to the jus soli, which allows the immigrants' children to join the national community. Since World War II the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain have legislated measures along these lines.

But the growing convergence of European law around citizenship is exemplified by the legislation Germany adopted in 1999. The Germans now made a place for the droit du sol. The British response represents rapprochement of a different kind. As noted, traditionally, the right of citizenship in England was based on the subjects' oath of allegiance to their monarchy. Everyone under the jurisdiction of former colonies had, as a consequence, the right to freely inhabit British soil. To gain greater control over African and Asian immigration, however, the government has in recent years modified the law by giving full benefits of citizenship only to British citizens born in the United Kingdom.

In the early twenty-first century, in all nations that comprise the European Union, three categories are distinguished vis-à-vis the right to citizenship: citizens of the various nations, citizens of Europe, and non-Europeans.

See alsoEuropean Union; France; Germany; Holocaust; Immigration and Internal Migration; Maastricht, Treaty of; Minority Rights; Soviet Union; Switzerland; United Kingdom; World War I; World War II.

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GÉrard Noiriel