ABSTRACT
Citizenship is essentially an unwritten contract between the individual and the state which defines the responsibilities that a citizen has to the state, and the rights that they are entitled to in return. However, as T. H. Marshall (1950) noted in one of the classic works on citizenship, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are not set to any absolute standard, but are the product of a dynamic process of social development. Marshall details, for example, how in the emergence of liberal democracy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the primary emphasis was placed on the political rights of citizens, such as the right to vote or the right to freedom of speech. In postwar Europe the focus shifted to social rights, such as the right to education and to public health services, as social democratic welfare states were constructed. This was not replicated in the United States, where the economic rights of the individual remained more important – a balance that has been introduced into Europe through the processes of state restructuring of the last two decades. As such, citizenship is always politicised and contested.
