Citizenship In The Context Of Ideologies

"Citizenship" is an everlasting topic. In the period of Ancient Greece, it is the symbol of not only status but also the public spirit. However, in the period of modern nation-state, citizenship is inherent to all the citizens of the states and it means the civil right should be protected by the laws. Although the word of "Citizenship" have changed a little since the Ancient Times, the meaning of the "Citizenship" is not old. Recently, the controversy on the citizenship in the field of political philosophy has arisen more and more attention in the western academic circles. For the theory, this change is nature evolution, because it try to integrate the need of Justice and membership in the community. For the reality, because of the wave of globalization and post-modernity, the political environment has changed a lot, such as:reconstruction of the classes and lots of New Social Movements which asked for recognition and redistribution. As a result, a series of social problems such as identities of emigrants and aboriginal peoples use the civil rights and obligation to express their appeals so that civil rights and obligation have been redefinition even that the meaning of the citizenship has changed. From aboriginal rights, women rights and civil rights to animal rights and language rights, we find that in the western country there are more and more requests of inclusion and attribution and they become a "revolution of rights".The political theory of citizenship roughly contains four trends, such as:liberalism, communitarianism, republicanism and post-modernism and they have profound controversy. Liberalism emphasizes the individual freedom and defends the individual rights; Communitarianism insists the value of community and pays attention to the social solidarity; Republicanism advocates the not only individual rights but also group rights and post-modernism emphasized the minority rights. As a result, people not only regard citizenship as law rights but also regard the citizenship as a social process. Through this process, individual and social group appeal rights, broaden the boundary of the rights.In the article, there are eight chapters. In the first Chapter, I will give an overview of the theory of citizenship, then in the second chapter, I talk about the most popular paradigm of the theory of citizenship in the western society especially in British, and I discuss the critics and challenges to the tradition paradigm of citizenship. In the third chapter, I focus on the liberalism citizenship from the classical to modern liberalism. I conclude that the liberalism citizenship emphasized the individual rights. In the fourth chapter, I talk about the communitarianism citizenship which emphasized the aspects of citizen obligations. In the fifth chapter, I discuss the republicanism citizenship which focus on rebuild the citizen virtues. In the sixth chapter, I talk about the post modernism citizenship which concentrate on defending the differentiated citizenship and the different recognitions. In the seventh chapter, I compare these four political thoughts and talk about the disagreements on the theory of citizenship. I try to seek the agreement on these four political thoughts on citizenship on four aspects:the possibility of the inclusion of liberalism and the deliberative spirits on the practice of citizenship and the possibility of the group rights as the citizenship and the citizenship based on the conections or relatives. The most important things in my dissertation is that I will try to find the origin of the internal tension in the theory of citizenship in the controversy of political philosophy and search the possibility of solution to the internal tension.