Citizenship has had a millennial-long history and its influence upon politics and practice has been deep and wide. Policy-makers and scholars have commented on citizenship's role and a number of volumes have been written expounding its origins and content. Yet citizenship, as we know it, has been called into question by globalisation, the process of European integration and the increasing internal differentiation of political communities. These have challenged the institutional setting of the nation-state within which modern citizenship emerged, making the conventional idea of citizenship as membership in an undifferentiated statal community unsuited to contemporary developments. In addition, if we believe that within a territorial state the governed have a rightful claim to participate, either directly or indirectly, in the process of political decision-making, and that democracy entails higher standards of legitimacy than nationalism, then the nationality model of citizenship generates exclusions which are difficult to justify from a normative point of view. Indeed, this internal contradiction creates several problems which, as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, may be for practical purposes insoluble. But does this mean that the concept of citizenship is in danger of obsolescence? And if it is concluded that citizenship cannot survive in its current form, are there alternative ways of thinking about it?

In answering these questions and reflecting on the limits and possibilities of citizenship, there are two things we cannot afford to ignore: namely, history and theory. One needs to look more closely at citizenship's past and present, before examining its future prospects.