The ambiguous meaning of citizenship

At one point in human history somebody had the idea that the handling of the affairs of his community was not necessarily incumbent upon the big landowners, the wealthy, the military leaders or the heads of the most powerful tribes, clans, and families, in other words: upon the ‘natural’ masters of the community; rather, the survival and the well-being of the community might be better served if its matters were conducted by a class of individuals who due to their personal qualities and resources were valuable for the community as a whole. This was the birth of the idea of citizenship. It is a matter of historiography to find out who was the first to conceive this idea – most authors ascribe it to the Athenian political leader and reformer Solon [about 630-560 B.C.] – whereas political philosophers and jurists have to ponder the implications and the consequences of that idea for the character of the order of a community in which citizenship is a pivotal institution. Its history of now more than 2500 years encompasses a great diversity of political entities, ranging from the ancient Greek polis through the Roman republic, the Roman empire, the medieval towns of Northwest Europe, the Renaissance Italian city-republics to its modern version invented in the French Revolution which made it a core element of all variants of the contemporary constitutional state. Even in the modern absolutist state which emerged in the 17 century citizenship had not been entirely abolished and forgotten. Its persisting timeliness can be viewed from the fact that the European Union has recently created the new status of European citizenship (more precisely: Union citizenship) and that, moreover, even the 18 century-idea of humankind and cosmopolitism has now found its current equivalence in the notion of ‘earth citizenship’. Given that historical duration it is not surprising that the concept encompasses a great number of very diverse layers of meaning. Obviously the polites of the smallscale Greek city republic, the civis Romanus of the Roman empire with its vastly extended territories reaching from North Africa to England and from the Middle East to Spain, the citizens of the medieval, mostly rural towns with their local trade and manufacture, the militant citizen-warrior of the Renaissance Northern Italian cityrepublics, the subaltern subject of sovereign statehood of the 17 century and finally the modern citizens of the democratic welfare state do not have much in common, to say nothing about such mysteries like European citizenship and ‘earth citizenship’. Or