earticle

영어

Citizenship is a concept having universal persuasiveness. Citizenship, the sign of the full membership, ensures citizens to be legally free and equal person. The reason why scholars explore how far citizenship has expanded and how much the specific rights of citizenship have been realized and how well each citizenship of each age is compatible with the principle of equality is that citizenship is a realistic law to perform human rights. To investigate the following questions—is citizenship fair, is citizenship a law to include as many as possible or a law to exclude the others by situating them as exception—first of all this paper examines the history of citizenship. From ancient Greek age to modern age, citizenship developed and expanded to more universal and more equalitarian forms. Secondly, this paper explores the tension between citizenship of the universal status and the nation-state of the exclusive community through the relationship between French Revolution and modern citizenship. While the modern citizenship which limited citizens to national people endowed its own people considerable equality and freedom, that system has been based on the exclusion and disadvantage of the foreigners and migrants. Thirdly, this paper proves that competitive capitalism took advantage of the modern citizenship which focused on the civil rights to pacify the inequality. Furthermore, this paper asserts that in the present global age, for citizenship to be faithful to its inner logic of being universal and equalitarian, the human rights of non-citizens must be included in citizenship.