Three kinds of belonging
Meaningful citizenship is richer and more complex than either blood or bureaucracy
We are used to the stereotype of the bad immigrant. Even if he is legal, he enjoys the protection of an acquired passport and the welfare state without contributing anything to society or even learning the language properly. During heated arguments, this figure is often countered with that of the bad native, who also enjoys the munificence of the state without lifting a finger (and is no doubt far from being God’s gift to his native tongue), and yet looks down even on good immigrants as somehow less deserving. To be a good citizen, then, it is not enough to hold a passport, nor even to belong unequivocally to the native tribe. So what exactly is it? That depends what we mean by citizenship.
The Bible tells us the Apostle Paul had no fewer than three distinct citizenships. When he is arrested while preaching in Jerusalem and accused of being an Egyptian rabble-rouser, Paul protests that he is a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, and thus, ‘a citizen of no mean city’ (Acts 21:39). We can detect some civic pride in his hometown here. When he is threatened with flogging, though, he points out that he is also a Roman citizen (Acts 22:25). At this stage, he has never actually been to Rome. It’s unlikely that he spoke any Latin and he certainly did not follow the Roman religion; citizenship is a legal privilege he inherited from his father, who probably bought it. But, so to speak, it is a useful passport to hold, because it means he cannot be mistreated. Finally, writing to the church in the Roman colony of Philippi, he reminds his fellow Christians that, as much as they might benefit from Roman citizenship, ultimately, ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (Philippians 3:20). That is, they share an identity with other Christians that is not of this world, echoing Paul’s famous remark elsewhere that there is neither Greek nor Jew in Christ.
The case of Paul captures three different ways of thinking about citizenship, each of which has more to do with belonging than either blood or bureaucracy. We can think of these in terms of different types of membership. Natal citizenship is like membership of a family, clan or tribe; implicit and almost irrevocable. What we might call ‘passport citizenship’ is more transactional and is mostly about benefits, like membership of a business association or professional body, even a library or gym. Finally, creedal citizenship involves membership of a community united by a belief or idea. It could be a church or a revolutionary party. Rather than benefits, the emphasis is on duty or responsibility to some transcendent goal shared with other members. All three forms of membership can and do apply to citizenship: it’s not that one or two are right and the others are wrong. But the balance is crucial.
Beyond blood and soil
I don’t suppose I have to labour the trouble with an excessively nativist view of citizenship. Most countries have a degree of internal diversity – ethnic, religious, geographical – whether or not they also have inward migration. Paul, remember, was a Jewish citizen of Tarsus. An excessively narrow conception of who truly belongs can lead to the exclusion and persection of minorities. Nevertheless, most successful polities do have a clearly national character. I don’t by this mean stereotypical dress, cuisine and mannerisms. I mean the simple fact that citizens identify with their country without having to think about it. They have a sense of belonging based on birth and upbringing rather than official status or adherence to a creed. All being well, and without disparaging other countries, people love their country in the same (perhaps complicated) way they love their family.
The beauty of Roger Scruton’s book England: an Elegy (2000) is that it expresses love of country in all its complexity and sometimes contradictoriness, even it can only do so in the past tense. (Scruton was that kind of conservative.) As an elegy, it calls to mind David Brooks’ distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. When you die, you probably don’t want someone to stand up at your funeral and catalogue your career achievements. You want them to talk about what you meant to the people you loved and who loved you. For the same reason, a eulogy is always going to be personal, reflecting the particular experience of the person giving it. The same is very much true of Scruton’s elegy for England, which unashamedly reflects his geographical and class background, his generation and his personality. Nevertheless, his particular experience was an experience of England, a country with its own geography and history. It’s telling that Scruton insists England is a country rather than a nation. (There’s a sense that nations are terribly European things.) Scruton’s England is neither an ethnic nor a political community, but an enchanted isle.
I say ‘isle’, but it is striking how little love there is in the book for Britain or the British. Scruton includes just a few grudging acknowledgements that the other parts of Britain might share some of the fine qualities of England, even as they fall short in other ways. For him, it seems, Britain was closer to being a political or even bureaucratic construct than a real country. Again, that no doubt reflects his particular background.
Nevertheless, Britain and England remain as entangled in death as they were in life. And it’s important to note that their purported demise has little to do with immigration, which Scruton barely discusses. He is much angrier about the Local Government Act of 1888. So it is unfortunate that debates about citizenship and the national character tend only to take place in the context of immigration. (It has indeed increased hugely since England: an Elegy was published in 2000, but is rightly seen by many as a symptom rather than a cause of national decline.) Nevertheless, such debates can shed light on things even unintentionally.
When, earlier this year, Keir Starmer worried that we risk becoming ‘an island of strangers’, he was roundly condemned for sounding like Enoch Powell. In fact, much of what he said was quite reasonable. That particular phrase was unfortunate only because any modern society, as distinct from a medieval village, involves living with strangers. Of course, there are strangers and strangers, but part of what Scruton loved about England was the aloofness of its people: ‘English society was a society of strangers, who kept each other at a distance, while acknowledging each other’s right to belong … Strangers do not live together by affection, by family sentiment, by swearing bonds of blood brotherhood in the manner of the Arabian tribes. They live together by law, convention and a silent appeal to precedent.’
This is a description of England, whose people have their particular way of being strangers, but it could describe not only Britain as a whole, but almost any modern, liberal society. Norway, for sure, but to a large degree Italy too, as well as the former British colonies, including to a considerable extent urban India.
One of the foreign writers on England approvingly cited by Scruton is Nirad Chaudhuri. He is best known, ironically, for his brilliant Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. Published in 1951, the book was dedicated: ‘to the Memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: “Civis Britannicus Sum” [I am a British citizen] because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.’ Unsurprisingly, the dedication was not universally popular, and was omitted from the 1999 edition by its British publisher Picador. But Chaudhuri was no toady; as his Latin indicates, he was aware that much of the best of Britain was itself an inheritance from the classical world.
The dedication also also highlights the distinction between citizens and subjects. Imperial subjection was a more one-sided kind of belonging: Indians belonged to the British Empire, but the British Empire did not belong to them. And yet, clearly some Indians did feel an affinity with the mother country. Chaudhuri opens his autobiography with chapters on the places that formed him as a child: the Bengali town of Kishorganj, where he was born and grew up, the ancestral village of his father and the village of his mother’s family (both of which he visited regularly) and finally England, which he never visited as a child, but which had a powerful hold on his imagination. I suppose empires will do that.
Beyond rights and responsibilities
Even as mere subjects, Indians in the Raj experienced different kinds of belonging. Chaudhuri describes the difference between life in his ancestral village, where his family dominated and could order their inferiors about, and in the town, where their social peers were not relatives, and workers and servants had to be paid. ‘I suppose on this score our urban relationships could be called social as distinct from tribal and economic as distinct from feudal.’ More than that – and remembering Scruton’s description of England – ‘At Kishorganj, we felt that there was a tie which was not created by the mere friendliness of a number of people towards one another, nor by their having to pay one another, but by some cohesive power belonging to the town in the abstract and exerting its influence on everybody who came to live in it. … The town was the town in its own right, claimed loyalty in its own right, and made people feel drawn to one another on account of their common membership of the town. … It must have been a feeling of this kind which lay at the root of the Greek loyalty to the polis. It was created, and at the same time rested on, a new awareness, the political.’
I do not know whether this new awareness, and the social conditions that gave rise to it, were the result of British rule or would have emerged anyway. But Indian political consciousness would soon be mobilised against British rule, with at least some Indian thinkers drawing on that same classical inheritance to make the case for self-rule. In Kishorganj, though, the sense of belonging described by Chaudhuri was more pre-political than properly political. The town’s polis was really an association of middle class professionals. And even its full ‘citizens’ remained subject to the Raj; they did not govern themselves. That mattered little, though, because at that time, as Chaudhuri puts it, a citizen’s life ‘was overwhelmingly the pursuit of personal prosperity’.
These tensions between citizenship and subjection, and between public and private concerns, underpin the second kind of belonging I’ve described: one that is not given by birth but more transactional in character. It is tempting to see this as a degeneration of true citizenship. In the case of India, though, political citizenship had its origins in this pre-political sense of belonging that grew up in the shelter of the Raj, and indeed in relation to it; Kishorganj began life as a purely administrative unit before taking on a life of its own. And is not something similar true of medieval Europe, where guilds and other associations laid the foundations of liberal capitalism even as lords and kings held on to political power? The history is very different, but the progress from pre-political associations to political parties certainly rhymes.
Nevertheless, classically, the transition goes the other way. A distinction has long been made between politically active citizenship on the model of the ancient Greek city states described in Aristotle’s Politics, as well as the Roman republic, and then a more passive, legalistic kind of citizenship associated with the Roman Empire. Paul the Apostle might have been a Roman citizen and benefited from the protection of the Roman law, but he certainly would not have voted or otherwise had any say in the running of the empire.
Modern citzenship is different, of course, in that it embraces whole populations rather than a slave-owning elite as in the ancient republics, or even a slave-owning elite supplemented by freed slaves, foreigners and anyone else who could pay for the privilege in the case of the Roman Empire. But the same tension exists between the idea of politically active citizenship and a more passive, transactional version. In fact, it could be argued that mass democracy lends itself more readily to the latter, with a focus on rights and responsibilities rather than self-rule. Despite that, mass, active democracy has also had its moments, with large numbers joining political parties and engaging in social movements as well as voting in elections. If there is a tendency towards passivity today, it has less to do with the logistics of mass democracy than the disillusionment of the masses with politics and of politics with the masses. This is nowhere better exemplified than in the European Union.
The EU embodies a particular model of citizenship that applies not only to the EU itself but also within its member states, and that has nothing to do with active participation in politics. The EU is suspicious of or hostile to national sovereignty and of citizens’ aspiration to self-rule. In a sense, the model EU citizen is not even resident in his or her home nation. He or she enjoys freedom of movement too much to be pinned down. Certainly, during the Brexit referendum, much was made of the contribution made by EU citizens in Britain: how hard they worked, how much tax they paid. But, while we can hardly begrudge their lack of interest in British domestic politics, it’s a strange kind of model citizen who does not even vote.
Then, after the referendum, the concept was floated of something called ‘EU citizenship’ for Remain-voting Britons who had been left broken-hearted by the result. To be fair, some took the plunge and moved to the EU country of their choice. Perhaps they became good Portuguese and German citizens. Thousands more applied for Irish passports purely for convenience or some sense of personal satisfaction. Fair enough. But this putative EU citizenship was something else. It was a little like the generic Britishness I discussed earlier, reflecting a desire to sit in the tree without putting your weight on any particular branch. But at least there is such a thing as a British state. You can pay taxes to it; you can join its army; you can vote in its parliamentary elections. You can’t do any of those things with the EU except through one of its member states. Generic EU citizenship, which of course came to nothing, could only ever have been a glorified work permit. And fundamentally less like membership of a political community than membership of a golf club. Pay your dues and enjoy the benefits.
To an extent, this kind of membership is a legitimate and necessary aspect of genuine, national citizenship. The state provides certain services and grants certain privileges to those in its care. But as the name suggests, national citizenship is based on the natal sense of belonging – even if it is in practice not limited to those share that kind of belonging – and that means the quid pro quo is less stark. Even if you are not a particularly good citizen, you still enjoy the benefits of belonging. The state collects rubbish, provides education and guarantees national defence not because there is a market for those things, but because it has a duty to its people. And if you don’t pay your taxes, you can be imprisoned, but the state does not for that reason leave your rubbish uncollected, turn your children away from school or let the Russians invade your house. Moreoever, while a golf club will expel members who break the rules, the state cannot deport its own citizens even when they break the law.
All this is to say that even the transactional aspects of citizenship are not merely transactional. They depend on a kind of belonging, whether acquired through birth or naturalisation. This is why it is ironic that the Windrush scandal was grabbed on by some who oppose any distinction between those who belong and those who do not (‘no one is illegal’). What made it a scandal was that people who had every right to consider themselves British nationals were treated as foreign nationals. Regardless of the paperwork, someone who came to Britain legally from a Commonwealth nation and has lived here for decades clearly belongs in a way that someone who’s just stepped of a plane from Lithuania does not.
Beyond belief
The USA is perhaps unique in celebrating, or mythologising, the idea that you can come from anywhere in the world and become an American just like that. The reality, of course, is that it takes time and money to acquire American citizenship. And that many Americans question the Americanness even of legal migrants. But even the myth is more complicated. It’s often said that the USA is a creedal nation – one based on the truth, justice and the American way – but that’s overstated. While Americans do not share a single ethnicity, there is clearly a distinct American identity forged from the culture and religion of the particular groups that founded the nation, above all British ones. But the American creed is not Protestantism in any of its British varieties. The Founders also carried the cultural memory of two centuries of religious conflict in Europe, and were at pains not to import it to the new world. The American creed is an a sense anti-creedal. Its focus on liberty, including religious liberty, means there is a minimalism about it. Having pledged allegiance to the Flag and the Republic for which it stands, everyone has the right to pursue happiness in his or her own way. But it’s a minimalism born of a particular religious tradition: if not Puritanism or Episcopalianism, then Christianity more generally. When Paul told the Philippians their true citizenship was in Heaven, he did not mean they should turn their backs on Rome. Christianity is uniquely compatible with a kind of dual citizenship: one for the political sphere, and another for the spiritual. It’s easy to forget that the freedom of the former emerged from the particularity of the latter. Other religions do not in theory lend themselves so readily to dual citizenship, though in practice, people of all religions and none have flourished in America. Liberalism took on a life of its own.
In 1790, George Washington visited the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, and followed up with a famous letter, which read in part: ‘All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.’
One year earlier, in Revolutionary France, the Constituent Assembly had debated how their new constitution should treat minorities. Although the revolution later took an anti-religious turn, at this stage it was still taken for granted that France was a Catholic country. Protestants had long been excluded in various ways. There were particular questions about Jews, who were considered unsociable because they did not mix with gentiles. The Count Stanislas–Marie–Adélaide de Clermont–Tonnerre made the case for complete religious freedom, with an important qualification. In response to concerns that the Jews comprised a nation of their own within the French nation, he said, ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. … they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually’.
Clearly, the fear was that there is dual citizenship and dual citizenship. A spiritual rival citizenship is one thing, a political one quite another. But were the Jews really a political threat to the French state? Unlike Catholics in 16th and 17th century Britain, for example, they could hardly be accused of allegiance to a foreign power. Washington’s more sanguine approach reflected both a more realistic assessment of what the Jews represented and the more minimalist nature of the American creed. Constitutionally, people were indeed citizens individually, but if they also chose to form associations based on religion or ethnicity, that was their business. Clermont-Tonnerre’s comments on the Jews may have been a concession to entrenched anti-Semitism in France, but they also reflected the more maximalist nature of the French revolutionary creed, which – in others’ hands – would culminate in the official Cult of Reason being set up to replace Christianity altogether. Creedal citizenship can be as exclusive and oppressive as the natal kind, especially when a creed is imposed top down rather than reflecting popular sentiments.
The anti-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre is well-known for his assertion that, ‘there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc … But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.’ This is often quoted as an example of unreconstructed reaction, of someone rejecting universal humanity in favour of narrow particularism, but de Maistre’s point was more subtle. The context was his critique of the French constitution of 1795, which he argued had been written with this abstract, hypothetical man in mind, and not the actual French people. De Maistre argued that a genuine constitution would consider, ‘the population, the mores, the religion, the geographic situation, the political circumstances, the wealth, the good and the bad qualities of a particular nation, to find the laws that suit it’. This is surely common sense. Many nations are more alike than we sometimes think, but the similarities should be observed and not assumed.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warns that racism could spell doom for Western civilisation, not because people retreat into nationalism, but because nations dissolve into races: ‘when Englishmen have turned into “white men”, as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man’.
The point is that nations and countries are real, at least most of them are. Race is an abstraction. You can actively belong to a nation or country in a way you cannot belong to a race, not even the human race. The mistake of the Cult of Reason and similar ideologies is to make a creed out of thin air and expect people to belong to it. Some might say that’s very French, but French republicanism ultimately succeeded by reconciling the idealism of the Revolution with at least some of the actual needs and desires of the French people, and the result was a civilisation with much to admire. It was also clearly a form of Western civilisation, with features that would have been recognised by Aristotle as well as Arendt; not least, citizenship.
What brings us together as citizens is nothing so abstract as our common humanity. Our citizenship is comprised of interweaving strands: common heritage, common rights and responsibilities and common beliefs. The weight given to each varies over time and between places. But if there is such a thing as universal humanity – and I think there is – it emerges not from biology or from abstract ideas, but from participation in civilised life, which means being a citizen of a particular polis.
This essay is adapted from a lecture given at the Ideas Matter event, Upheaval: why politics needs a new language, on 6 July 2025.
The theme of national belonging and its complexities is further explored in my novel, The Pictish Princess ..and other stories from before there was a Scotland.