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Citizenship, Subjecthood and Nationality in Alternate History

Ciclavex

Baron Ciclavex of Grittysborough in New Sweden
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So, there was a bit of discussion about citizenship, along with the attendant debate about the privileges and responsibilities thereof, over in Chat, and it made me think about citizenship and nationality as concepts.

For one thing, they are a fairly new concept as we understand them. Citizenship itself is a very old concept, of course, but the meaning of British, French, American, Swedish or Chinese citizenship today against is very, very different from what was meant in Athens when they discussed what it meant to be a citizen of the polis.

Citizenship itself has even changed back and forth within a single idea — Roman Citizenship, for example, was originally a very exclusive club, alike to the Athenians, and which literal civil wars were fought over the definition thereof, and whether even other Latin-speakers from Rome’s region could hold citizenship rather than being mere associates. And then, a few mere centuries later, Roman citizenship was extended to essentially every free person who happened to reside in and identify with the much more vast Roman Empire. This ideal of Roman citizenship became so powerful that it took several centuries to break down in the Latin West beyond what it took the Empire itself in the west to fall; when the Eastern Romans had dealings with Goths, Franks and Lombards, for centuries thereafter, it was done with the understanding that the people living under the latter Germans were all Roman citizens, even though the Empire had contracted. When the Eastern Roman Empire would expand back into the west, many of these people were instantly fully reintegrated into the civic life of the Empire, as though the Empire had never gone away, and it wasn’t for a very long time that Roman citizenship would become associated in the Empire with the Greek language and Greek culture, once again gaining an linguistic-ethnic identification — and one which was utterly divorced from its original meaning.

In medieval times, the citizen as a resident of a particular city with rights there was back to being the norm, and it isn’t until the latter-day republics of the modern age that you start to see the ideal of citizenship be restored, along the lines of Roman Citizenship — the United Provinces, to an early, but limited, degree, but much more so when you see Corsica, the United States and the French Republic coming in. And, even then, that concept didn’t spread into monarchies immediately, with subjecthood - and owed fealty or loyalty to a particular sovereign - being the norm. And, given monarchies with effectively free subjects being common even in that age, the difference between being a subject of the Swedish Crown and being a citizen of the United States was minuscule — indeed, one could very well argue that Swedish subjecthood was far more broad and liberating than American citizenship for a very long period of time before Sweden adopted citizenship.

Which then comes to our modern understanding of nationality and citizenship as related, if distinct, concepts. The idea of one’s nation rather than one’s sovereign being the major defining element in determining to what you owed your allegiance is a very, very modern concept. Of course, nations exist, and nations have fought for independence, freedom and liberty since long before the seventeenth century, but our modern understanding of citizenship, nationality and nationalism are all born of a very much modern understanding of what these things mean, and based upon a fundamental rejection of the idea that a sovereign makes a state, with instead a state making a sovereign.

Anyway, all of this is a very, very wordy introduction to a question — how could our conception of these ideas be different in different AH? Even if you go along with the citizenship of the Enlightenment, even that was more exclusive than our modern understanding of it in the West is — what if it remained so? What if it was framed differently?

And, for that matter, is our modern, western understanding of citizenship so wrapped up in the Roman Empire and its legacy that the entire concept might not even exist in a timeline where that Empire went a different direction, or never formed at all? Would the concept be so alien that we could hardly even refer to it as such, except in the specific case of cities and the right to own property there?

Thoughts, anyone?
 
Citizenship and place is an interesting concept, I think its that thats so revolutionary.

Theres always (more or less) been a set of cultural markers that says "we are these people and they are different" but a lot of that I think was tied into elite status. Rome is a very odd old state in which that citizenship status was expanded to mean everyone who lived in Roman territory but only gradually, and only after the elites it had bought into the package fought for it in return for peace.

I don't know enough about non-western cultures to say much about those sadly. But certainly from the historical records we see elite packages handed down, certain items or dress maps to the top tier of society and membership of it. We get a decent look at that from the migration period and from the assemblies we find going back to the bronze age. But the poorer members are archaeologically invisible almost

But I do think its not a cooncidence we start to see citizenship and rights become arguably the big issue once education and paper gets spread around. That ability for more and more people to pass or understand the criteria for the "we are these people and they are different" club expands to cover not just the elite and top tier but vast swathes of the new middle class and more of the upper working classes.

So that suggests that citizenship at least partly is partly an economic feature, and importantly a peace feature. Tie enough people into a wide ranging network of contacts, give them the means to get rich and you get them clamouring for citizenship with the rights thereof. The similarity between modern nationalism and Roman citizenship is striking in that regard.
 
I do find myself wondering if the traditional Chinese approach to citizenship could end up being more widespread and enduring than it was- it's basically the concept of jus sanguinis taken to the logical extreme that all descendants of your people worldwide are still subjects of the Emperor (or theoretically citizens of the nation) and cannot possibly be subjects/citizens of any other nation. Hand in hand with not allowing the concept of naturalised citizenship for foreigners of course.
 
One of the big factors in the rise of nationalism was modernization. The development of better communications, the movement of people from the countryside to the cities, rising literacy rates, etc. made it so that people identified themselves with a nation rather than with their local area (a good study on this phenomenon is Eugene Weber's Peasants to Frenchmen). So in a world without modernization we probably wouldn't have nationality, and in a post-apocalyptic world it's possible that people would revert back to pre-modern forms of identity. This does raise the question of if it's possible to have modernization without the corresponding rise of nationalism, and what such a world would look like.
 
Interesting discussion. The modern concept of citizenship is quite contingent, and could have developed in any number of other ways in allohistory, even with relatively recent divergences.

I think that a big part of this question would also be about what provides the authority of the state, and how the concept of sovereignty works. While the concept of "Westphalian sovereignty" is a bit of a misnomer, the idea of sovereignty developed as something linked to the people was an important one. Ideas of citizenship or equivalent would function quite differently in a world with a different concept of sovereignty (or vice versa).

In a shameless self-plug, I'll comment that I've explored similar questions in the Lands of Red and Gold universe about citizenship, nationhood, sovereignty and the question of what makes a state. This wasn't based on changes as far back as Roman citizenship, but started to diverge (slowly) in a changed Thirty Years' War and things drifted differently from there. The "present" of that timeline hasn't yet reached the modern world, but I've started to look at that idea in flash-forwards and the like.

One quote from this timeline's "Nationalist Manifesto" illustrates one aspect of it pretty well:

"“Mankind dwelt on this world for a hundred millennia, and knew his identity in his heart. He roamed where he wished, and where he resided did not change who he was. For scarce two millennia, states have adopted borders, and claimed that where a man lives determines who he is. Yet a truth which has endured for a thousand centuries cannot be unmade by a fewscore decades of wishful thinking.”
 
A related discussion we could talk about is race. Given that IOTL racial categorizations were created in response to colonialism and the need to justify European hegemony it's pretty clear that we could end up with different categories. And that in turn effects how people would view citizenship and nationality.
Interesting discussion. The modern concept of citizenship is quite contingent, and could have developed in any number of other ways in allohistory, even with relatively recent divergences.

I think that a big part of this question would also be about what provides the authority of the state, and how the concept of sovereignty works. While the concept of "Westphalian sovereignty" is a bit of a misnomer, the idea of sovereignty developed as something linked to the people was an important one. Ideas of citizenship or equivalent would function quite differently in a world with a different concept of sovereignty (or vice versa).

In a shameless self-plug, I'll comment that I've explored similar questions in the Lands of Red and Gold universe about citizenship, nationhood, sovereignty and the question of what makes a state. This wasn't based on changes as far back as Roman citizenship, but started to diverge (slowly) in a changed Thirty Years' War and things drifted differently from there. The "present" of that timeline hasn't yet reached the modern world, but I've started to look at that idea in flash-forwards and the like.

One quote from this timeline's "Nationalist Manifesto" illustrates one aspect of it pretty well:

"“Mankind dwelt on this world for a hundred millennia, and knew his identity in his heart. He roamed where he wished, and where he resided did not change who he was. For scarce two millennia, states have adopted borders, and claimed that where a man lives determines who he is. Yet a truth which has endured for a thousand centuries cannot be unmade by a fewscore decades of wishful thinking.”
I do like the idea of internationalist identities emerging. OTL we already have a number of identities, be they religious, racial, class-based, whatever, that are supranational. It's just a matter of getting it so that those are the primary identities of people, which as you say may require a different concept of sovereignty and statehood.
 
There's a legitimate discussion to be had about how much of the ideas of modernity emerged because of conditions unique to where it started (Western Europe) as opposed to general conditions that would have emerged in any society to go through the process of modernization first and export it to the rest of the world.
 
A related discussion we could talk about is race. Given that IOTL racial categorizations were created in response to colonialism and the need to justify European hegemony it's pretty clear that we could end up with different categories. .

Like, say, if instead of Indian civil servants brought to Africa, we'd decided a different nation/race was the 'civilised' one? "Hey, those Native Americans sure have it going on, maybe they can help oversee Colony X" for example.
 
I think we might see, if the PoD is as far back as Ancient Rome, the concept of tiered citizenship, with more rights and responsibilities for each tier.
 
One thing I could definitely see emerging differently is the concept of suffrage, or mass voting in general, which basically emerged out of the idea of noble councils. An alternate modernity could instead emphasize participation in mass organization, religious institutions, or demonstrations.

Syndicalism a la Kaisereich?
 
Like, say, if instead of Indian civil servants brought to Africa, we'd decided a different nation/race was the 'civilised' one? "Hey, those Native Americans sure have it going on, maybe they can help oversee Colony X" for example.
You could see that too, but what I'm thinking of is having completely different racial categories emerging, or even no categories at all. For example, in a world where China was the dominant colonial power we might not see the concept of "Asian" emerge, or in a world where Islam becomes the dominate religion in Europe there might not be a concept of "white" people.
 
Like, say, if instead of Indian civil servants brought to Africa, we'd decided a different nation/race was the 'civilised' one? "Hey, those Native Americans sure have it going on, maybe they can help oversee Colony X" for example.

I think it could be quite possible to have the main breakdown end up being defined far more by faith than by skin colour. Some sort of combination of the historic Kingdom of Kongo, maybe have another major sub-Saharan Empire convert to Catholicism early on, toss in a couple of conversions among the Native Americans and you've got the age-old concept of 'Christiandom' extended beyond Europe- one where you get stuff like 'oh Guineans are totally fine to enslave, they're all Pagans or Mohamadeans at best, but you tried to pull what with those Ashantee?

It's the sort of situation which might see a tiered system in Asia of 'Catholics/Christians recognising the authority of the Pope > other Christians > Muslims/Jews/Sikhs > Buddhists/Jains > Confucism > Hinduism > Shinto/Shamanistic etc.' based on some sort of strange conception of how close someone's faith is to being a recognition of the correct faith or something.
 
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