Defining British Citizenship

Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain

Rieko Karatani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135762315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Unlike many nations Britain had not developed a national citizenship by the 20th century. Instead belonging in Britain was merely a function of allegiance to the Crown. This lack of definition was seen as beneficial. This title explores the implications of such vagueness as a new millennium begins.

1
Understanding Citizenship

WHEN WE fill in an immigration clearance form at an airport, we complete a section on ‘nationality’ by using terms such as ‘British’ or ‘Canadian’. However, the legal titles for formal membership in Britain and Canada are ‘British citizenship’ and ‘Canadian citizenship’. The indiscriminate use of the terms ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ is not merely accidental, but suggestive of the way in which citizenship is understood today. Today it not only describes one’s legal status as a formal member of a state, it is also supposed to imply one’s national membership however a ‘nation’ is defined.¹ In the end, ‘the state claims to be the state of, and for, a particular, bounded citizenry’, asserting its legitimacy on the basis of the will of that citizenry which is grouped by a shared identity and loyalty to the state.² Especially after the Second World War, this understanding of citizenship—national citizenship—is the prevalent international mode.

In the history of citizenship, however, it is less common for people to possess a single type of formal membership of a political unit than to have multiple forms of citizenship at the same time. Recently, the national type of citizenship has been facing challenges to its meaning and role, especially in Europe. The European Commission in 1987 declared, for example, that 322 million Europeans had been given a ‘new citizenship’, European citizenship. Subsequently, it was officially granted by the Maastricht Treaty in 1991 to the citizens of the member countries of the European Union (EU) to supplement, and not supplant, their national citizenship.³ A citizenship structure with multiple citizenships, such as in Europe today, where people possess two different kinds of citizenship— one of a member state, and the other of the EU itself—has always persisted in Britain. Even today, a child born in London whose parent is a British citizen, for example, automatically acquires both British citizenship and Commonwealth citizenship by birth.⁴ In order to examine Britain’s experience of citizenship, therefore, we need an analytical framework for understanding the development of a citizenship structure which allows multiple citizenships in one way or another. It is this point that this research emphasizes in carrying out its analysis. Unlike previous works, it provides a study of the development of citizenship structure in Britain by examining the implications and consequences of Britain’s effort to build and maintain the global institutions of the Empire and, later, the Commonwealth.

This chapter therefore has two aims. First, it seeks to present a brief account of the concept of citizenship, as a status, as a right and obligation, and as a sense of identity. This account will establish an analytical framework for understanding both national and alternative types of citizenship, which will be applied throughout the book. Second, by using the analytical framework, this chapter re-examines the various types of citizenship in British history, that is, British subjecthood and Commonwealth citizenship, and their citizenship structure, none of which fit into the international mode of national citizenship.

The chapter begins with an analysis of the concept of citizenship by taking into consideration three elements of citizenship, that is, the nominal, the substantive and the functional elements.⁵ It then explores the national and the non-national types of citizenship. Among non-national types of citizenship, this study classifies three models of alternative citizenship, referring to them as the imperial, composite and cosmopolitan models.⁶ On the basis of a detailed analysis of these models of alternative citizenship, the chapter concludes by discussing Britain’s experience of various types of citizenship in order to illustrate how they differ from national citizenship.

THE CONCEPT OF CITIZENSHIP

Subjecthood, citizenship and nationality

In our everyday language, we use the words ‘citizen’ and ‘national’ almost interchangeably in order to describe the status of formal membership of a country, saying, for example, that a person is ‘a citizen of France’. For some countries, such as Japan, the term ‘national’ is preferred. Coming from a country which is a monarchy, jurists and politicians in Britain historically preferred the term ‘subject’ to ‘citizen’, claiming that ‘the law and language of England knows subjects only’.⁷ Indiscriminate usage of these three terms is typically found in the treaty between the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States in 1870. The treaty was signed in order to ‘regulate the citizenship of the British subjects who have emigrated…to the United States of America’.⁸ It also provided the way in which those subjects who had become naturalized within the United States ‘shall be at liberty…to resume their British nationality’.⁹ However, since each of the terms originates from a different historical period, their meanings differ from each other, depending on the time and place of their use.

The concept of subjecthood derives from the feudal tradition of vertical links between each individual (subject) and the common ruler of the political unit. Subjects were supposed to owe allegiance to the power or jurisdiction of the political unit in return for the protection which they received.¹⁰ Unlike in some countries, such as the United States, the tradition of subjecthood persisted in Britain well into the twentieth century. In the case of the United States, because of its colonial past, the original concept of formal membership was predominantly influenced by the practice in Britain. However, in the late eighteenth century, the traditional concept of allegiance and subjecthood was dealt a severe blow by the American Revolution and American independence from British rule. As the number of immigrants of non-British origin had increased in the mid-eighteenth century, the basic rule of subjecthood—natural allegiance (‘birth within the king’s ligeance’)—came to be questioned in the 13 American colonies. The colonial government encouraged naturalization, which was outside the rule of natural allegiance, so that it could accept newcomers as formal members. Under the system of naturalization, naturalized subjects became formal members purely on the basis of their own will and their consent to the rule of the government. Comparing the mode of ascription by naturalization with that by birth, therefore, those colonists who were not satisfied with the control exercized by the imperial government in London started to question the concept of natural allegiance. They claimed that they had been denied the right to choose loyalty because of the principle of natural allegiance. For them, the status of British subject, and consequently perpetual loyalty towards British rule, was imposed on them at their birth. They were not even allowed to renounce their subjecthood. The American concept of citizenship was inevitably redefined after independence by the idea of ‘Volitional allegiance’, and was based on an act of individual choice.¹¹

British nationality and immigration laws, in the absence of such an interruption as the American Revolution, continued to develop on the basis of allegiance and the common law doctrine of allegiance to the crown.¹² Even in Britain, however, the term ‘subject’ became obsolete and finally disappeared in 1981. Now, under the British Nationality Act 1981, British citizenship has become the status of people who are ‘closely connected with the United Kingdom’ and ‘“belong” to the United Kingdom for international or other purposes’.¹³ Although both ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’, as is seen in the BNA 1981, denote formal membership of a political unit, ‘citizenship’ is said to stress the municipal side of formal membership, and ‘nationality’, the international.¹⁴ There are cases, as a result, where each term legally indicates a different group of people and is assigned a specific purpose. In the United States, for example, the inhabitants of overseas territories such as the Marianas and American Samoa are ‘US nationals’, but not ‘US citizens’¹⁵

Three elements of citizenship¹⁶

Modern legal usage aside, ‘citizenship’ is an evolving concept, whose meaning in academic literature changes from time to time and place to place, and in accordance with the focus of each piece of research. As a result, the debates on citizenship tend to begin with a historical survey of the concept.¹⁷ On the basis of existing research, this study considers that there are three elements of citizenship—nominal, substantive and functional—which can be found throughout history.¹⁸ There exist voluminous pieces of research which deal with one or other of the three elements, although some of them have received more scholarly attention than others. First, citizenship denotes formal membership of a political unit. The size or the organization of the political unit, that is, whether it is a city-state, an empire, or an international entity such as the EU, varies. The criteria for qualifying for the status of citizenship also differ from one period to another, such as from being a freeborn male to being willing to become a full member of the political unit. We assume today that citizenship means full membership of a political unit. Yet, in the past citizenship could confer a half-membership, such as civitas sine suffragio in the Roman Republic, which did not include the franchise.¹⁹ Nonetheless, the nominal aspect of citizenship—‘citizenship-as-status’²⁰—has always been a part of the concept.

Second, formal membership brings with it either a set of rights (‘citizenship-as-rights’) or duties and obligations (‘citizenship-as-desirable-activity’), or both. These constitute the substantive element of citizenship. The issue of citizenship-as-rights has been heatedly debated among academics since the publication of T.H.Marshall’s work in 1950.²¹ Marshall, taking the British historical experience as an example, classifies citizenship rights into three components—civil, political and social—and argues that each of them was extended to citizens one by one after the eighteenth century The content of citizenship duties, in contrast, has remained almost the same throughout history. They have mainly consisted of military service and the payment of taxes, as well as the giving of loyalty and support to a political unit. Among the works on ‘citizenship-as-desirable-activity’ today, however, there are different branches of the argument with respect to what is desirable: whether the emphasis should be placed on economic self-reliance, political participation or civic virtue.²² It is true that the content of citizenship rights is changing, and the emphasis on the duties and desired behaviour differs in accordance with one’s theoretical position. It was also only in the twentieth century that the principle was finally established that all the holders of citizenship should be given an equal set of rights, regardless of gender, wealth, colour or creed. Nonetheless, we cannot dismiss the fact that citizenship-as-status confers certain rights upon, and assigns certain obligations to, its holders.

The third element—the functional—refers to the feature of ‘citizenship-as-social-enclosure’, which has the functions of both inclusion and exclusion. First, as regards the function of inclusion, the qualifications for citizenship-as-status have historically widened, with slaves, the poor and women now being included as formal members of the political unit. In the face of increasing numbers of immigrants today, some countries, such as Canada and Australia, expect them to apply for formal membership after their entry.²³ They try to incorporate non-citizens into the political unit and demand support and loyalty in return for granting them formal membership and its consequent rights and privileges.

However, owing to the advances of technology and the increasing sophistication of control methods, especially since the Second World War, exclusion has often received more attention than inclusion.²⁴ Although the degree of the effectiveness of citizenship-as-social-enclosure and the basis on which it is implemented diff differs from time to time and place to place, citizenship has historically been used as an instrument to divide populations between citizens and non-citizens. As a consequence, intended or not, citizens are expected to share a sense of community with each other. This socio-psychological dimension of citizenship is especially important in the case of national citizenship, and differentiates national citizenship from other types of citizenship.

National citizenship

On the basis of the general analysis of the concept of citizenship (nominal, substantive and functional) above, the term ‘national citizenship’ is used in this study to refer (i) to the legal status of state membership; (ii) to a whole set of rights and obligations equally conferred on all the holders of that status; and (iii) to an instrument for differentiating its holders from non-holders, whose criteria are based on nationhood. Some scholars conclude that national citizenship is now, in theory, ‘egalitarian, sacred, based on nation-membership, democratic, unique, socially consequential’.²⁵ In other words, the nominal aspect of citizenship today has to be the legal status of a state, not an empire or a city-state. Neither is it like that of the mediaeval kingdoms in western Europe, where people simultaneously belonged to different and overlapping groups, such as their clan, a kingdom and a religious group. Furthermore, ...