But if lawyers have tended to treat
modern ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ as
fundamentally identical terms, many contemporary
political theorists and historians
of political thought have analyzed the
apparent declining emphasis on participatorycitizenship in modern regimes in another
way. They often distinguish between
‘liberal’ conceptions of citizenship, usually
traced back to the seventeenth-century
political tracts through which John Locke
shaped the English and later the American
Revolutions, and ‘republican’ conceptions
of citizenship, often traced back to the
eighteenth-century writings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, if not to Machiavelli and Aristotle
(Hutchings, 1999). ‘Liberal’ conceptions
are said to present civic membership basically
as an instrument of a diverse range of
self-interested personal life plans, with the
emphasis generally on seeking economic,
religious, and familial fulfillment. The guarantees
of basic protections from one’s
regime contained in international law notions
of citizenship are thought to be generally
consonant with this ‘liberal’ view of citizenship,
so long as basic human rights are not
violated. In contrast, ‘republican’ conceptions
still insist that citizenship must involve
rights and practices of political participation
to achieve common goods. Many modern
regimes are then analyzed as combining ‘liberal’
and ‘republican’ civic elements. The
resulting argument is that, for good or bad
reasons or both, modern societies have simply
moved toward more ‘liberal’ than ‘republican’
civic conceptions (e.g. Sandel, 1996).