What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen?

Imagine you move to a new country. You live there for years. You pay taxes, you have a job, you make friends, you follow the laws. But you can’t vote. If you get into trouble, you could be sent back to a place you barely remember. You are not a citizen.

Or imagine you were born in a country. You have never left it. You have a passport, you can vote, you can run for office. If you break the law, you stay. You belong.

That difference—between being a citizen and not being one—is one of the most powerful divisions in the world. It decides where you can live, whether you can be deported, whether you have a say in how your society is run, and even how safe you feel. But what exactly is citizenship? Is it just a legal label? Is it something you do? Is it a feeling of belonging? And who gets to decide who counts as a citizen anyway?

These are the questions philosophers have been arguing about for thousands of years. They still haven’t settled them.

Three Ways to Think About Citizenship

Most philosophers agree that citizenship has three dimensions, though they disagree about which matters most.

Citizenship as a legal status. This is the simplest meaning. A citizen is someone who has a certain set of rights: the right to live in the country, to work, to vote, to get a passport, to be protected by the law. Non-citizens might have some of these rights too, but not all of them, and not as securely. This is citizenship as a kind of membership card.

Citizenship as political activity. This is about what citizens do. They vote. They protest. They argue about what the government should do. They run for office. From this perspective, someone who never participates isn’t really being a citizen, even if they have the legal status. They are more like a passive subject.

Citizenship as identity. This is about how you feel. Do you think of yourself as belonging to this country? Do you feel connected to your fellow citizens? Do you care about what happens to them? When a sports team wins, do you feel a little bit proud, even though you didn’t do anything? That’s the identity dimension.

These three dimensions are connected, but they don’t always line up. Someone might have legal citizenship but feel no loyalty to the country. Someone might participate actively in politics without feeling much connection to their fellow citizens. Someone might feel deeply attached to a place where they aren’t legally a citizen at all.

Two Old Models: Republican vs. Liberal

For a long time, philosophers argued about citizenship by pitting two models against each other.

The republican model comes from ancient Greece and Rome. In this view, a citizen is someone who rules and is ruled in turn. The whole point of citizenship is active participation in making the laws. If you just sit back and let others decide, you aren’t really free—you’re just being managed. The ideal citizen is someone who shows up to public meetings, debates issues, serves on juries, and takes turns holding office. This model treats citizenship as a kind of job, not just a status.

The liberal model developed much later, especially after the Roman Empire expanded and gave citizenship to conquered peoples. When citizenship gets stretched across a huge territory, you can’t have everyone meeting in the town square to make decisions. So citizenship becomes more about being protected by the law than about making the law. The ideal citizen is someone who goes about their private life—working, raising a family, pursuing their own interests—and trusts the government to stay out of the way. Politics is just one interest among many, not the center of your identity.

Both models have problems. The republican model seems unrealistic for large, modern countries. How can you be an active participant when there are millions of other citizens and your vote barely matters? The liberal model risks turning citizens into passive spectators who have no idea what their government is doing and no way to stop it if it goes wrong.

Some philosophers say we need both models. As one thinker put it, the passive enjoyment of citizenship sometimes needs to be secured by active politics. You can’t just enjoy your rights without occasionally being willing to defend them.

The Feminist Challenge

Starting in the 1970s, feminist philosophers pointed out something both models had in common: they assumed a sharp split between “public” life (politics, work, the marketplace) and “private” life (the home, the family, raising children). And in both models, women were assigned to the private sphere and excluded from citizenship.

In the ancient Greek version, the public sphere was where free men made decisions about justice and the common good. The private household was where women, slaves, and children took care of the boring necessities—food, clothing, cleaning—so that men could be free to be citizens. Women were considered too emotional, too tied to nature, too focused on particular people to be trusted with political judgment.

The liberal model had a different version of the same problem. It claimed to treat everyone as equal individuals, but underneath it assumed that women naturally belonged to the household, subordinate to their husbands. The famous phrase “all men are created equal” turned out to mean men.

The feminist argument wasn’t just that women should be included. It was deeper: the whole split between public and private is a political choice, not a natural fact. Laws about marriage, divorce, childcare, and domestic violence structure what happens in the “private” sphere. You can’t keep politics out of the home because the home is already shaped by politics.

This critique led to a broader question: if politics can’t be separated from the rest of life, then citizenship can’t be about transcending your particular situation to adopt a “neutral” point of view. Maybe good citizenship means starting from where you actually are.

Should Citizenship Be the Same for Everyone?

For much of the 20th century, the dominant idea was that citizenship should be universal: everyone gets the same set of rights, and the law should be blind to differences of race, gender, religion, and culture. The hope was that equal rights would eventually lead to equal belonging.

By the 1980s, this hope was looking shaky. In the United States, African Americans had formal citizenship rights, but they were still far from equal. Women had the vote, but they still faced systematic disadvantages. Critics argued that the supposedly neutral, universal model actually favored the majority group. When the law pretends to be blind to difference, it usually ends up treating the majority’s way of life as the normal one and making everyone else adapt.

So some philosophers proposed a differentialist model of citizenship. The idea is that equal respect sometimes requires treating people differently. If a group faces special obstacles because of their religion, their language, or their history of oppression, maybe they need special rights to be genuinely equal.

This leads to complicated questions. Should minority groups get guaranteed seats in parliament? Should religious groups be exempt from certain laws? Should national minorities (like the Québécois in Canada or the Catalans in Spain) have their own self-governing institutions?

Some critics worry that too much differentiation will break the bonds of shared citizenship. If everyone retreats into their own group, who will care about the common good? Who will make sacrifices for strangers? Defenders of differentiated citizenship point out that most minority groups want to be included—they just want inclusion on fairer terms. The real threat to social unity, they argue, is not difference but injustice.

What About People Who Aren’t Citizens?

So far, we’ve been asking: what does it mean to be a citizen? But a more urgent question for many people is: how do you become one?

Countries have borders. They decide who can enter and who can stay. They decide who gets to be a citizen and who doesn’t. But do they have the right to make these decisions? Or is there a fundamental human right to move freely across borders?

Some philosophers argue for open borders. Their reasoning goes like this: if you believe that all people are morally equal, then it’s hard to justify treating someone differently just because they happened to be born on the other side of an invisible line. Being born in a wealthy country is just luck, not something you earned. So why should that luck entitle you to a whole different set of life opportunities?

Others argue that political communities have a right to control their membership. Just as you can decide who gets to join your club or live in your house, a country can decide who gets to become a citizen. Without that right, they say, countries would lose their ability to maintain their culture, their social programs, and their way of life.

There’s also a practical problem. In the world we actually live in, the rich countries of the North are staggeringly wealthier than many countries in the South. Most philosophers agree that this global inequality is unjust. Some argue that until rich countries do their fair share to fix it, they have no right to close their borders to people from poorer countries.

This debate isn’t abstract. Right now, millions of people live in countries where they aren’t citizens. Some are refugees fleeing war or persecution. Some are migrant workers who have lived in a place for decades. Some are children brought to a country when they were too young to have any choice in the matter. They pay taxes, they work, they raise families—but they can be deported at any time. They have obligations to the society they live in, but not all the rights.

Can Citizenship Exist Beyond the Nation-State?

For most of history, citizenship has been tied to a specific country with clear borders. But in an age of global migration, international corporations, and environmental problems that cross borders, some philosophers ask: does citizenship have to be national?

Maybe citizenship can exist at multiple levels: local, regional, national, and even global. You could be a citizen of your city, your country, and the world all at once. Some people already talk about “global citizenship” as a way of saying that we have responsibilities to all humans, not just our fellow nationals.

But skeptics point out that the institutions for global democracy barely exist. There’s no world government, no global elections, no way for ordinary people to have a say in international decisions. Transnational organizations like the United Nations are run by governments, not by citizens. And even the most committed global activists tend to direct their demands toward national governments, because those are the ones that actually have power.

Perhaps, some philosophers say, we should focus on expanding citizenship from below: making it easier for long-term residents to become citizens, giving voting rights to non-citizens who live and work in a country, and making borders more porous rather than trying to build a world government.

Who Gets to Be a Citizen?

At the very end of the debate, there’s a question that goes to the heart of what citizenship means.

For most of Western history, philosophers assumed that citizenship requires a certain kind of rational agency. You need to be able to reason, to deliberate, to form and express opinions about what is just and unjust. This is why women, slaves, children, and people with cognitive disabilities were excluded: they were thought to lack the necessary rationality.

Today, most of those exclusions have been rejected. But the basic assumption remains: citizenship is for beings who can think and talk about politics in a certain way.

Some philosophers are now challenging even that assumption. If we take seriously the idea that people with profound cognitive disabilities are full members of society, maybe we need to rethink what counts as political participation. Maybe expressing pleasure or discomfort, showing approval or dissent through behavior, relying on trusted others to interpret your needs—maybe these can count as forms of political agency.

And if that’s true, some argue, then maybe domestic animals could be considered co-citizens too. This sounds strange, but the logic is consistent: if citizenship is about membership in a society and having a say in how that society treats you, then animals who live among us and are deeply affected by our laws might deserve some form of political consideration.

Most philosophers aren’t ready to go that far. But even raising the question shows how much is at stake in how we answer the basic question: who counts as a citizen, and why?

Why This Still Matters

The debates about citizenship aren’t going away. They show up every time a country changes its immigration laws, every time a group demands recognition, every time someone says “go back where you came from” or “no one is illegal.” They show up in arguments about whether schools should teach in minority languages, whether religious symbols should be allowed in public buildings, whether people who have lived in a country for decades should have the right to vote.

At the heart of all these debates is a tension that philosophers haven’t resolved. Citizenship seems to require both commonality and difference. You need enough shared identity to make collective decisions and care about strangers. But you also need enough room for people to be different—to have their own cultures, values, and ways of life—without being forced to assimilate.

No one has figured out exactly how to balance these two things. And maybe there is no perfect balance, only ongoing argument and adjustment.

But that argument is itself a form of citizenship. When people argue about what citizenship should mean, they are already doing some of the work of being citizens.

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Citizenship	The status, activity, and identity of belonging to a political community
Legal status	The bundle of rights and protections that come with being a citizen
Political agency	The capacity to act as a participant in political life
Republican model	The view that citizenship is primarily about active participation in self-rule
Liberal model	The view that citizenship is primarily about being protected by law and pursuing private life
Universal citizenship	The idea that all citizens should have the same rights, with no special treatment for groups
Differentiated citizenship	The idea that equal respect sometimes requires different rights for different groups
Public/private split	The division between political life and home/family life, which feminists argue is political
Open borders	The argument that people should be free to move across borders
Birthright citizenship	Getting citizenship by being born in a country (jus soli) or to citizen parents (jus sanguinis)
Constitutional patriotism	Loyalty to a country’s democratic principles rather than to its culture or ethnicity

Appendix: Key People

Aristotle – Ancient Greek philosopher who argued that humans are political animals and that citizens are those who rule and are ruled in turn
T.H. Marshall – 20th-century British sociologist who argued that citizenship expanded over time from civil rights to political rights to social rights (like welfare)
Iris Young – 20th-century political philosopher who criticized universal citizenship as favoring the majority and argued for recognizing difference
Will Kymlicka – Contemporary Canadian philosopher who defends multicultural citizenship and distinguishes between different kinds of minority rights
Jürgen Habermas – Contemporary German philosopher who argues for “constitutional patriotism” as an alternative to nationalism
Michael Walzer – Contemporary American philosopher who argues that political communities have a right to control their borders and membership
Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka – Contemporary philosophers who argue that domestic animals could be considered citizens

Appendix: Things to Think About

Should someone who has lived in a country for twenty years, paying taxes and following laws, have the same rights as someone born there? What if they’re living there illegally?
If a minority group wants to run their own schools in their own language, is that a threat to national unity or a reasonable way to make them feel included?
Is it fair for rich people to buy citizenship in another country? What might be wrong with “cash for passports” programs?
Do you think animals who live with humans should have any kind of political status? If not, what’s the difference between them and humans with profound cognitive disabilities?

Appendix: Where This Shows Up

In debates about immigration policy and who should be allowed to become a citizen
In arguments over whether to ban religious symbols (like headscarves or crucifixes) in public schools
In discussions about voting rights for people in prison or for non-citizens who pay taxes
In real-world tensions between national identity and multiculturalism, like debates over Quebec separatism, Catalan independence, or the treatment of minority languages
In the question of what the European Union should become: a loose economic agreement or something closer to a federation with real citizenship rights
In decisions about whether to revoke citizenship from people convicted of terrorism