A 2,000-Year-Old Argument: Should We See Citizenship As a Membership or a Social-Contract?

The Greeks and Romans had competing views of citizenship: link-based and transaction-based. Little has changed in 2,000 years.

Citizenship at law is a concept that has been assigned different values throughout history and been imbued with political, legal, moral, commercial, even supra-national dimensions. These may, in turn, lead to different versions of what supposedly is one and the same ‘unitary’ citizenship, and to varying forms of acceptance of such citizenship. Citizenship can indeed be a conundrum. For the most part, it functions as a system of rigid in- or exclusion that operates in the specific, closed circumstances of a particular state. At the same time, citizenship today demarks global human progress, through the lens of the state but, also, becoming subject to universal Human Rights. With the emergence of citizenship by investment ('CBI') as direct payment based admissions, citizenship may become re-imagined as a more flexible system pertaining to the logic of the global market for membership entitlements.