much more than that. As a legal status the grant of citizenship gives people
rights in the political system they inhabit. At minimum there will be the right
to be domiciled in and take part in the political mechanisms of the state, usually
through voting. There will also be the status of legal equality with all others and
the entitlement to be treated thus in the court—what the AmericanBill of
Rightscallsequal protectionanddue processof the law. In most modern
liberal democracies citizenship also ensures the protection of otherhuman
rightsandcivil liberties, not all of which may be available to people who
have the right of abode in the country. With lesser rights than a citizen, a
subject is someone who owes loyalty to a political sovereign but has no right to
partake in the decision-making processes of the system. A subject may have
other rights, particularly the rather diffuse right to be protected by the power
he is subject to when abroad, but a subject does not have the right of political
participation.
The concept of citizenship comes to us from the Greek democracies and,
with somewhat of a change in emphasis, the Roman Republic. For the Greeks
a citizen was one of the equal participating e ́lite in a society where the
numerical bulk of the population, women, slaves and resident aliens, on whom
the prosperity of the society largely depended, had no such right. Neither did
they share all of the duties: only a citizen could be expected to take up arms in
defence of the society, a distinction usually accepted by modern democracies
when applying conscription laws.
Recently there have been attempts to claim that the full conception of
citizenship involves a broader duty: concern with the common interest and a
sense of communal purpose and values. Thus citizenship is contrasted with a
more individualistic orientation where one has no duty other than narrowly-
defined legal duties and where the pursuit of self-interest protected by one’s
rights within the state is fully legitimate and all that can be expected or asked of
the citizen. Thuscommunitariantheorists seek to place citizenship in a set of
value preferences, rather than making it a purely procedural concept.
Citizen Soldier
The citizen soldier has a significant place in much democratic theory. There is
no clear distinction between a citizen soldier and a conscript, and the term is
sometimes used to cover the latter, but the full implication of independence
and voluntariness found in, for example, the early American statemilitiasis
lost when the term is broadened to include all soldiers who are not career
professionals. The paradigm has for a long time been found in Switzerland, but
citizen soldiers have been valued in many other historical contexts for
centuries. There are two important characteristics of the citizen soldier, the
first of which relates to control of the political system. Citizen soldiers, whose
Citizen Soldier