Greek citizenship may have been born from fear of slavery
In ancient Greece any farmer who fell into debt could be enslaved. The historian Geoffrey Hosking argues that this constant danger made Greeks prize freedom so intensely that they built political institutions to protect it, creating one of the first forms of citizenship, a status that was exclusive from the start.
Citizenship means membership of, and allegiance to, a sovereign state. It usually never expires and lets people live, work and vote in their country, and perhaps carry its passport. English speakers often treat it as a synonym for nationality, but international law separates the two ideas. For most of history, the populations of states were subjects; citizenship was a special status rooted in the rights of city dwellers, the free men of ancient city-states and later the burghers of medieval towns, and only gradually extended to most national populations.
The polis of ancient Greece was small and intimate, and the duties of citizens were woven into daily life. It was also sharply unequal. Citizens ranked above women, slaves and resident foreigners known as metics, and slavery gave owners the leisure to take part in public affairs. Some scholars, following Giorgio Agamben, trace citizenship to these Greek cities, while others see it as largely modern, only a few centuries old.
Two traditions now compete. The civic-republican view treats citizenship as an activity, a commitment to duty and civic virtue expressed through involvement in public life. The liberal-individualist view, which strengthened from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sees citizens as autonomous people who pay taxes, obey laws and defend the country when needed, but are otherwise politically passive and chiefly focused on improving their own lives. The state exists to protect their rights, and social rights were added later. One argument holds that most people live by the second model while wishing they lived by the first.
Exclusion runs through the whole story. States once barred people from citizenship because of skin colour, sex, ethnicity, lack of land or enslavement, and most of those bars have gone. Some remain: the Gulf states rarely naturalise non-Muslims, and Qatar requires foreign athletes it recruits to profess Islam. Scholars also stress that the idea shifts across cultures, and one academic article describes a distinct Chinese politics of peopleship.
Source: Citizenship
