 | Thomas Patrick Burke, Th.D.
Every country now is said to have "citizens." At least, it says
this typically on their passports. However, most of the 192 nations
represented in the United Nations have imported the concept of
citizenship, for the most part only in a merely verbal and superficial
sense, from the West, where it was first developed. The idea of
citizenship was created by the ancient Greeks, and developed and
enlarged by the Romans. The earliest organization of human beings was
by blood relationship: the family, the tribe and the clan, and for much
of the human race these are still the entities to which one owes one's
primary allegiance. The citizen was something different: a person who
gave his first allegiance not to his tribe, but to his city. Tribes are
governed by personal relationships, but cities by the rule of
impersonal law. In ancient Athens the citizen was a ???????, a member
of the polis or city. Aristotle is frequently quoted as saying that
"man is by nature a political animal," but what he actually said was
more like, "man is by nature a city animal," which was not far from
saying that man was naturally a citizen-animal. In saying this,
however, Aristotle was deceived, for although Greek men were
citizen-animals, this was not true of the Persians or the Egyptians or
indeed of anyone else. Greek cities were different from most modern
cities in that modern cities tend to exist in and be subordinate to the
much larger political and economic units that we call countries or
nations, as Philadelphia exists as part of the United States. Greek
cities, however, during the classical period up till the end of the 4th
century B.C. were politically and economically independent entities,
states which created their own distinct identities out of their own
laws and customs, such as Athens or Sparta, and made war or peace as
they chose.
The citizen was a member of the city, not
just in the sense that he resided there, but that his membership gave
him special rights and also responsibilities in it. The city was ruled
by its citizens. Citizenship was a privilege and to be a citizen was
to have the consciousness of being privileged. Together with his
fellow-citizens he contributed to the city's financial upkeep and to
its defense, and was entitled to share in its benefits. Citizenship in
Athens meant having to be ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat when
the city was attacked, and was restricted to males who had completed
their military training and whose parents had been citizens. This was
a relatively small group, perhaps no more than a quarter of the
population. Democracy in Athens was not exercised through the election
of representatives, as ours is, but was direct: all citizens had the
right to vote in the Assembly directly on any proposed legislation or
judicial action, which meant that thousands of men spent a great deal
of their personal time without pay engaged in the process of
government. There was little bureaucracy. Only citizens could vote,
stand for election to office, file suit in a court of law or serve on a
jury. To be a citizen was to be conscious of being an equal among
equals. Although Aristotle lived much of his life in Athens, he never
became an Athenian citizen, but remained a citizen of his native city
of Stagira, and at the close of his life went back there.
The Romans believed in an open society and extended the rights of
citizenship to many other peoples. St Paul, a Jew, could boast of being
a Roman citizen. When the Roman empire in the West fell, much of
Europe lapsed again into tribalism. But it remembered its ancient
privileges and gradually, over the centuries of the middle ages,
restored them. The Americans fighting under George Washington said
they were fighting for "the rights of Englishmen," -- their inherited
rights of citizenship which they believed the British government had
taken from them.
It is very important to understand that
the true concept of citizenship, as a social relationship demanding a
loyalty that supersedes the family or tribe, has never really taken
root outside the West. China has never had citizens in this sense, nor
India, nor the societies of the Middle East or Africa. Patriotism,
perhaps, but citizenship is something different, for it includes the
right to participate in government. If you grew up in the United
States or any other Western country, you have grown up in a culture
deeply stamped with the concept of citizenship. To the citizen, his
country is a value in itself and exists in its own right. It does not
really exist for a purpose. But people who come to the nations of the
West from elsewhere must learn this concept: it is not part of their
societal inheritance. In its absence, one's first allegiance remains
typically to one's blood relatives, and the tendency is to look upon
civil society merely as a tool for the achievement of one's personal
ends.
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