24
chapter one
For the most part, the duties and obligations of citizenship are shaped
by the parameters of membership, rights and participation. In Citizenship
and Social Class, and Other Essays (1950), English sociologist T. H. Marshall
outlines his classical theory of citizenship where its associated rights are
divided into three components: the civil in the eighteenth-, the political in
the nineteenth-, and the social broadly assigned to the twentieth-century.
The civil element involves the rights and liberties necessary for individual
freedom (such as freedom of speech, opinion and thought, the right to
own property, to have valid contracts, and the right to justice); the political
element involves the right to participate in the exercise of political power;
and the social element involves economic welfare, security and a right to a
share in the social heritage of the community (Marshall 1950, 10–11).
Though he holds that each of these components or parts of citizenship
rights evolved in different directions and in various degrees since the seventeenth century, the trajectory of Marshall’s theory of citizenship goes in
the direction of the principles of the equality of all citizens as full members of society, common possession, rule of law, majority rule, democracy
and parliamentary representation, and so forth. Seen in this manner, the
institution of citizenship constitutes an overarching identity cloaking all
other identities to produce ‘equal’ citizen-subjects.
Of course, absent from this classical model of liberal citizenship is an
account of ethnicity, culture, gender and sexuality, class and religion as
major sources of identity, claims and participation – all of which have
complicated the existing problems of identity in increasingly globalized
societies.1 That said, and for the most part, citizenship in its contemporary
realization in liberal-democratic countries in North America and Europe
is universalistic in that it does not recognize or accept familial, tribal and
kinship ties as legitimate sources of authority, claim-making, and participation in the public sphere. Broadly speaking, citizens in most Western
liberal-democratic societies are at least formally conceived as rights-
bearing subjects who exercise their rights equally with other citizens, so
that no individual or collective is legally privileged insofar as they are citizens. Though modern citizenship in Western liberal-democratic societies
is certainly not always realized and practiced in this manner; and for such
a study each model of citizenship ought to be contextualized because it
differs heavily from state to state, the subjects of citizenship do have direct
affiliation with the state and direct access to its privileges and protection
1 For more, see Turner (2009, 65–73).
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