Citizenship

Citizenship builds on nationality and identifies the rights and obligations of a natural person in the state to which he or she belongs. In most cases, the question of nationality is to be answered with citizenship, the legal membership of the community (legal community) of citizens of a state, the citizens. Their nationality is not necessarily directly related to a state, since the latter, as an ethno-social concept, asks about origin and descent, but on the other hand can only mean citizenship. Thus the community of citizens of a state can be composed of many different nationalities with national majorities and minorities.

A state regulates the acquisition and loss of its citizenship as well as the associated rights and obligations in its own laws. Thus, in the German legal system, citizenship is usually acquired by birth and depending on the citizenship of the parents, or by naturalization. Rules that are linked to citizenship are applied accordingly to legal persons as far as possible.

Citizenship gives rise to special rights as rights of protection and defence against the state (freedom to travel, ban on extradition), as well as rights of subrogation in relation to third parties (consular protection, international litigation) and, in democracies, also rights of participation in state life in the sense of a status activus (political participation, participation in sovereignty). In the modern understanding of the state, civic duties can be, for example, compulsory military service, compulsory voting or the duty to pay taxes even if one is resident abroad.

In principle, citizenship can only be conferred by a sovereign state within the meaning of international law. Citizenship is an individual manifestation of the constituent element of a state, the state people, according to which a state can only be regarded as such under international law as long as it has a state people in addition to state territory and state power (→ three-element doctrine). The legal relations between state and citizen established by citizenship have an effect beyond the territory of the state and are also recognised by other states.

Historically, citizenship is an "institution of the nation-state". If the citizens (exclusively or predominantly) belong to a common nationality, one speaks of a (pure) nation state; if the citizens (mostly) belong to different nationalities, one speaks of a state of nationalities, a multi-ethnic state, occasionally also of a plurinational state or a multicultural state.

Citizenship is presumptively documented in a document issued to the person, for example the identity card or passport. In some states, the nationality is also indicated. Official proof of citizenship in Germany can be provided in the form of a citizenship card, which is issued on application.

History of citizenship

Citizenship as a permanent link between state and person already existed at the time of the polis in ancient Greece. This was differentiated in Ancient Rome, where Roman citizenship was virtually a prerequisite for the ability to do business or postulate and delimited a self-contained legal system that developed into the Corpus Iuris Civilis (civil law), while the Ius Gentium (i.e. "law of nations") regulated Rome's relations with other countries, states, peoples and was the precursor of today's international law. Roman citizens (Romanus) were the free inhabitants of Rome at the time of the Republic, later also the inhabitants of Latium and after the Confederate War the inhabitants of a large part of Italy. With the enactment of the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 AD, the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire became Roman citizens.

If a Roman citizen settled in a city outside Italy, he and his descendants remained citizens of Rome. Today, permanence is once again the fundamental principle of citizenship.

Citizenship in the modern sense has only arisen since the French Revolution through the emergence of republican thought, was regulated in the Revolutionary Constitution of 3 September 1791 in Part 2, § 2 and later incorporated into the Code civil. Since then, the state was understood not only as a territorial state or personal assignment to the absolutist monarchy, but also as a personal association of citizens. In the course of the 19th century, citizenship was subsequently introduced in most states, and citizenship laws were enacted.

Terms in the German language area

In the German-speaking world, both the term "Staatsangehörigkeit" (English nationality) and "Staatsbürgerschaft" (English citizenship) are used.

In Germany, the most populous state in the German-speaking world, the term German nationality is common because it was founded in 1871 as a unified German nation-state (German Reich), the majority of whose citizens (with the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 also called "Bundesbürger") are of German nationality (origin).

However, in the German Empire, only the citizenships of the respective constituent states, e.g. those of Prussia or Bavaria, initially continued to apply. Later, provisions of imperial law (such as the Reich and Nationality Act of 22 July 1913) ensured that citizenship was regulated according to the same principles in all constituent states. Article 3 of Bismarck's Reich Constitution of 1871 already subjected every citizen or subject of all German federal states to the common indigenous status of the German Reich, which can thus be regarded as the forerunner of uniform German citizenship.

A uniform German nationality was only introduced after the Reconstruction Act of 30 January 1934, a constitutional amendment to the Weimar Constitution in the course of the Gleichschaltung pursued by the Nazi regime, as a result of which the sovereignty of the Länder of the German Reich was abolished.

Even during the division of Germany, there was only one German citizenship for the Federal Republic of Germany - which consequently also politically and legally included the citizens of the GDR in addition to their own citizenship (1967-1990) (Art. 16 and Art. 116 Para. 1 GG) - which has been defined since 1913 in the Reich and Nationality Act (RuStAG; renamed StAG in 2000). With the demise of the GDR and the reunification of Germany, there is again only one German citizenship.

In Austria, the official term is Austrian citizenship, citizen of the state of Austria.

In Switzerland, whose native population consists of German-, French-, Italian-, Romansh- and multilingual individuals, Swiss citizenship means that the person in question is a citizen of the Swiss Confederation, as the state is officially known.

In monarchies, for example Liechtenstein, the citizens are also called subjects (of the monarch) and the citizenship is analogously called Untertanen(schaft).