Though useful for some purposes, all
these classifications fail, I believe, to recognize
how modern forms of citizenship have
emerged from political processes that predictably
generate societies that do not fit
readily into any of these pigeonholes. From
the eighteenth through the twentieth
centuries, modern nations arose chiefly in
struggles against preexisting monarchical
regimes and against European colonial
regimes, whether monarchical or not. In
those political contests many revolutionaries
found liberal notions of human rights
and republican notions of popular sovereignty
(along with later Marxist notions of
proletarian destiny) useful in defining and
legitimating their causes. Yet logically,
many of those ideals threatened systems of
political and economic power and status in
which the revolutionaries were themselves
invested, such as gender and ethnic hierarchies.
Furthermore, doctrines of a liberal,
republican, or workers’ state do not by
themselves explain why people should
embrace one particular liberal republic or
workers’ state rather than another.