Legal aliens are entitled to protection under the law and to use of the courts. The entry’s fourth and finalsection looks at how recent discussions in the fields of disabilityrights and animal rights challenge a basic premise of the literatureon citizenship since Aristotle: the idea that discursive rationalityconstitutes a threshold condition to citizenship.We will examine two versions of this disagreement.
Naturalise as a British citizen. Thefirst is citizenship as legal status, defined by civil, political andsocial rights. The second considers citizens specifically aspolitical agents, actively participating in a society’spolitical institutions. If citizenship is primarily a reward that gives access to resources its restriction is part of what gives it value, while if it is primarily a social good, that suggests that there is a benefit in facilitating the broadest possible access to it.
In some countries, citizenship can mean a citizen has the right to vote, the right to hold government offices, and the right to collect unemployment insurance payments, to name a few examples."membership in a community"The Center for the Study of Citizenship uses the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of citizenship:This definition allows us to define our reach broadly, focus upon social inclusion as well as exclusion, yet still fit the realm of citizenship.Citizenship is generally used as a synonym for nationality (see: nationality). Sometimes these are described in words like ‘loyalty’, ‘values’, ‘belonging’ or ‘shared cultural heritage’.
Stable citizenship regimes “promote internalredistribution and support co-governance”. The voluntarists respond that transnationalpolitical citizenship is not an oxymoron if we rid ourselves of theblinkers inherited from the past.
From Locke to Rawls, the answer has been overwhelminglynegative, confining these individuals to the category of wards (Arneil2009 and 2016, Pinheiro 2016, Clifford Simplican 2016). The legal status of citizen is essentially the formalexpression of membership in a polity that has definite territorialboundaries within which citizens enjoy equal rights and exercise theirpolitical agency. Citizens of one country who live in a foreign country are known as aliens. As JosephCarens puts it: “From this perspective, the danger of […]differentiated citizenship is that the emphasis [it] place[s] on therecognition and institutionalization of difference could undermine theconditions that make a sense of common identification and thusmutuality possible” (Carens 2000, 193).
Unless, of course,the capacity of states to act as efficient units of production anddistribution is linked to their being distinctive politicalcommunities with a particular culture of shared meanings worthpreserving.If we discard the abstractions that characterize both the classicaland the liberal conceptions, the citizen sheds his “politicallion skin” (Pateman 1989, 92 quoting Marx 1843) and appears as“situated” in a social world characterized by differencesof gender, class, language, race, ethnicity, culture, etc.