The first is the obvious problem of the
historical connection between citizenship,
nationalism and the nation-state. It has been
frequently recorded that ‘citizenship’ (citeseyn,
cite/sein/zein) is historically and
etymologically connected to the city and then
to the state. The citizen was originally a
person who, by living in the city, participated
in a process of cultivation or civilization.
While the pagans lived in the countryside, the
man of the city acquired both rights and
culture. Citizenship was thus an exclusionary
category. This is a generic problem,
since that which includes must by definition
exclude. But the historical connection has
always been made from the perspective of
not the excluded (strangers, outsiders,
aliens) but the included (citizens). Following
the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of
an international system of states, urban
citizenship further developed as a basic
foundation of the emergence of powerful
nation-states. With the development of
advanced administrative structures of the system of national governance, the state
was able to mobilize citizenship as an aspect
of nationalism. The state and citizenship
became necessarily combined to form effective
technologies of government.