What is Citizenship?

Abstract

The question ‘what is citizenship?’ is not an easy one to answer in any definitive way. This is partly because it incorporates a number of different elements, reflecting two major political traditions, and partly because of its contested nature. It therefore runs the danger of meaning what people choose it to mean and the question then is ‘which is to be master’ as Humpty Dumpty told Alice when she queried whether ‘you can make words mean different things’, (Carroll, 1947). The answers to both these questions are of considerable significance, for ‘the way we define citizenship is intimately linked to the kind of society and political community we want’ (Mouffe, 1992a, p. 25). It would be easy enough to proffer a bland definition but to do so risks suppressing citizenship’s contested nature. Instead, this chapter attempts to answer the question ‘what is citizenship?’ in two ways. First, it reviews the main elements that constitute the language of citizenship and that, in different combinations, provide the ingredients of the various definitions attempted in the literature — academic and political. Second, it discusses the main ways in which the concept is contested, leaving until later chapters the challenge from those who most certainly have not been ‘master’ when it comes to the articulation and practice of citizenship.