Citizenship : what everyone needs to know /
Peter J. Spiro.
- xi, 170 pages ; 21 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Citizenship is a like the air we breathe; it's all around us but often goes unnoticed. That is not a historically ordinary situation. Citizenship was once an exceptional status, a kind of aristocracy of the ancient world in which freedom and political voice were not taken for granted. Even as the nation-state emerged as the primary form of human association, citizenship remained an anomalous status, reserved for the few who were privileged as such in republican democracies. More recently, it has been the individual marker of membership in all national communities. It is generic; almost everyone has it, hence the ubiquity that has made it sometimes unseen. Most people never change the citizenship that they are unthinkingly born into; they have no cause to consider it any more critically than their choice of parents. Insofar as citizenship during the twentieth century came to be aligned with national community on the ground and in the public imagination, there was even less reason to look at it searchingly"--