ABSTRACT
Social sciences, philosophy and legal studies have dealt for decades with the concept of citizenship. As a result, the research on citizenship exhibits a high degree of conceptual and theoretical variety (e.g. Elman 2000; Frankenfeld 1992; Thaa 2001). Depending on the epistemological access to the notion of citizenship, scholars in general subscribe either to a normative account of citizenship or to the historic-functionalist one. Normative accounts of citizenship often refer to a lost ideal of Ancient Greek or Roman citizenship (e.g. Pocock 1992), canonising it into a universal citizenship standard. In contrast, historic-functionalist approaches to citizenship deal with the explanations of specific citizenship forms and their development as associated with functional requirements of societies such as military aspects of social life or the mode of economic activity (e.g. Marshall 1950; Weber 1998).
