Maarten Prak. Citizens without Nations

Almost everyone living on our planet today is the citizen of some nation-state. To be sure, some people have dual (or more) citizenships, and some are sadly stateless, but citizenship in one nation is the norm and it typically involves a clearly defined set of rights and obligations based on recognized membership in a national community. This was not always the case, of course. The ancient Mediterranean world had a concept of citizenship, notably in some Greek cities and in the Roman Empire, but most human beings in most societies were subjects rather than citizens. In medieval Europe the notion of citizenship reemerged, but it was exclusive to the inhabitants of cities—and not even all inhabitants. The privileges of citizenship were normally limited to specific groups of town dwellers, usually householders or property owners. All this began to change, famously, during the French Revolution, when privileges of every sort were...

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