 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and today's lecture is The Democratic Nation as Imagined Community. One of the fundamental problems in the sociology of democracy is the fact that democratic representative governments need a people to represent. In the modern world, the solution to that problem has been the imagining of the nation as the people. But who are the nation as people? And who gets to decide who they are? Modern systems of citizenship provide the answers, even if those answers are not always satisfactory or perhaps not always fair. If democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address, just who are those people? Ancient conceptualizations of citizenship and group membership focused on the rights and obligations guaranteed to the members of a particular community. That community might not have included everybody who actually lived in the community. The community was a community of people who belonged to the group, not including all of the people who happened to live with the group. So in ancient Greece, citizens were those people who were obliged to serve in the armed forces of the community. That meant men who had some minimum level of property. In theory, these men had political rights because they were the ones who had to fight on the basis of any decision made in the popular assembly. Of course, that excluded women, children, slaves, and all sorts of people who may have lived in the community but not been part of this imagined community of citizens. And those other people likely would have shared the same fate, or perhaps an even worse fate, than the men of property who had to fight in the wars. Nonetheless, the basic principle was that those who fight make the decisions. Roman citizenship was legally more formalized and came to be extended very widely, both in space and social class. Roman citizenship started out as maybe something a little more similar to Greek citizenship, except for the fact that Rome itself, uniquely, as far as we know, among cities of the ancient world, came to accept people, immigrants coming to Rome as citizens of Rome. In fact, one of the foundation myths of Rome is that it was formed by outcasts, by criminals who were not admitted as citizens of other cities of Latium and the Etruscan areas of Italy. And so Rome was founded on the boundary between the Latin area, which is now south of Rome, and the Tuscan area, which is north of Rome. And on that border in the kind of no man's land between these two cultural groups, people who were not welcome in their home cities, founded a new city in Rome. As a result, from very early days, Roman citizenship was more open and more flexible than Greek ideas of citizenship. Now, whether the foundation myth is true, and that's the origin of Roman citizenship, or that foundation myth is backdated from people's experience of citizenship in Rome, either way, as Rome expanded to cover the entire Mediterranean world over a period of a thousand years, its citizenship came to embrace most of the residents of that world. Again, not including slaves, but by the end of the Roman period, it did include women, and it included people of all social class. In fact, some of the wars of the late Republic in Rome around 100 BC were fought by people demanding Roman citizenship. People actually attacked Rome in order to claim their right to Roman citizenship, which is something it's hard for us to imagine today, a group attacking a country because they want the right to be citizens of that country. All ancient European societies, however, even including the Roman Empire, included large numbers of men, and in many cases, all women, who were either non-citizens or not full citizens of the societies in which they lived. Fast-forwarding to the modern world, as a new country founded in the name of the people, we the people, the United States was perhaps the first modern country to have to grapple with concepts of citizenship. Other countries slowly evolved concepts of citizenship based on whoever happened to live there. If you spoke French and lived in France, obviously you must be French, but in the United States, it was not really very clear who was an American and who was not at the very beginning. Citizenship in the United States from the beginning was constructed on the basis of what social scientists call an imagined community, imagined community may be based on real community ties, but it's also something that exists in the mind. So in the United States of 1789, white people who had been born in the 13 colonies themselves were implicitly accepted as citizens. But also people who were born in the mountains, in the hinterlands of America, people who lived in log cabins out in the frontier, who technically did not belong to any of the 13 colonies, were also implicitly accepted as citizens. Excluded from citizenship were people of African descent, especially if they were slaves in the South. And in fact, the US Civil War was fought in part over this question of citizenship for African Americans. In 1856, there was a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott decision, that explicitly stated for the first time that African slaves or African origin slaves were not citizens of the United States. They merely lived in the United States. And that decision put in place a whole series of events that led to war between the Northern and the Southern States, ultimately resulting in the victory of the North and an amendment to the Constitution of the United States making clear that the both African origin and white people in the United States were citizens. A second group in the territory of the United States that was initially excluded from citizenship were Native American communities. They were treated as foreign powers. In fact, the United States made treaties on a regular basis with Native American tribes and Native American nations, treating them as foreign countries in the same sense that France might make a treaty with Poland. These were simply other organized polities on the same continent as the United States. Of course, as the United States grew more powerful, it routinely disregarded those treaties and rewrote them at will. As a result of the vagueness of just who should be a citizen in the United States, the United States Constitution actually gave Congress the explicit power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization for the United States. That is, the United States Constitution gave Congress the power to decide who could be a citizen and who couldn't and under what terms. The United States was the first country to explicitly consider this question of who should be considered part of the community and who should not. This idea of the nation as imagined community quickly spread to Europe and especially to revolutionary France. The French Revolution led to the European concept of citizenship and membership in an imagined community, in this case membership in the French Republic, which was not open just to French people, but was open to Europeans who embraced the French concept, one in particular being Napoleon Bonaparte, a minor nobleman born in Corsica, which had only recently become part of France. It was previously considered part of Italy. Yet by embracing his Frenchness, attending a French military academy, joining the French army, Napoleon became indubitably French and in fact the emperor of the French. The French Revolutionary Governments instituted a policy called the Levé en masse, the Levé en masse, meaning that all citizens or at least all male citizens were responsible for fighting in the armies of France. So one way to become French was simply to fight in the armies of France and that tradition remains today in the tradition that non-French can join the French foreign legion and through their service the French foreign legion become citizens of France. The Levé en masse generated enormous armies by the standards of early modern Europe and those French Revolutionary armies were able to defeat the much smaller, more professional armies of the monarchies of Europe and this painting is a depiction of Napoleon at the Battle of Vienna in 1806 when Napoleon decisively defeated Frederick the Great of Prussia. Napoleon's victory over Prussia removed the last resistance in continental Europe, west of Russia, to Napoleon's rule in Europe. The historian George Hagel, who lived and taught at the University of Vienna at the time, is reputed to have said that the Battle of Vienna represented the end of history, that is the end of the history of European monarchies vying for power because now all that existed was the citizen and the state. Today every democratic nation is a kind of imagined community. No matter how recently or seemingly artificially created, this is a photo of the Merlion in Singapore, the vicious Merlion, the combination of a British lion with a mermaid or I guess a merman in this case combined into a single symbol for a country that had a British heritage in its legal systems and its colonial heritage yet depended on the sea for all of its commerce. Now there obviously is no such thing as a Merlion. There's no trace of a Merlion in local lore. This is a completely manufactured symbol of a new country that was born in 1965 without any deep roots of its own. Nonetheless, 50 years later, Singapore celebrates its national institutions in the same way as countries that have been around for hundreds of years and while it may seem very artificial for older people, younger Singaporeans have no real sense that anything is artificial about the creation of Singaporean nationalism. After all, they've grown up with it their whole lives and Singapore is not exceptional in this. The United States may now be a country of, you know, that's more than 200, almost 250 years old yet at the time it was created, it was also a brand new country with brand new symbols, brand new songs that must have seemed very strange at the time to people as well. Democracy requires citizenship in a way that dictatorships simply do not. That's why the modern institution of citizenship is connected with the rise of democracy in the United States and in France and then later in the rest of the world. The requirement that democracy requires citizenship becomes obvious in the embodied act of voting. When people physically go to vote, it makes it very obvious that democracy can only exist if there is a defined set of people who have the right to vote, who have a say over the government. Interestingly, democracy also seems to be the only kind of government that can support income taxes. Paying your taxes is another embodied act of citizenship. Dictatorships have a lot of trouble getting people to pay income taxes, that is to write a check at the end of the year to the government. Democracies routinely collect income taxes. Dictatorships rely instead on indirect taxes like sales taxes and company taxes that people don't have to physically sit down and write a check or make a bank transfer to pay. In the Americas, both North and South America, citizenship has traditionally been based on juice solely, while in the rest of the world it has been based on juice sanguinis. The two main forms of citizenship are called by these Latin terms juice solely and juice sanguinis. The word juice is recognizable as the root word for the English word justice, and effectively it means the right to something in the same way that justice is the status of being in the right or being correct. Juice solely literally means right of the soil and is citizenship based on place of birth. In juice solely countries, everybody born on the soil of the country is granted citizenship in that country. It doesn't matter if their parents were there as illegal aliens, it doesn't matter if they were simply transiting the country while in flight from one country to another. If someone is born on the soil of the country, that person has a right to citizenship. The rest of the world outside of North and South America uses the rule of juice sanguinis, right of the blood, meaning that citizenship passes down as something inherited from the parents. Now, juice solely countries also grant juice sanguinis. So if you are a citizen of the United States and you have a child outside the United States, that child is also a citizen from the moment of her or his birth. But the opposite is not true. So while juice solely countries grant juice sanguinis, juice sanguinis countries do not grant juice solely. And in fact, there are juice sanguinis countries like Germany in Europe where there have been generations of people who come from other countries who have never become citizens of the country that they live in. In Germany, this has notoriously been a problem of the Turkish population in Germany. Many Turks came to work in Germany as guest workers in the 1960s, 1950s, and 1960s. In some cases, their children and their grandchildren may not be citizens even today. Historically, many countries granted citizenship or something approaching the modern concept of citizenship based simply on residents. If you live there, you must be a citizen. But the rise of nationalism in the modern world has put an end to that practice. So if we go back 300 or 400 years ago, you would probably be considered, well, if not a citizen of France, at least a subject of the French king if you happen to live in France. No longer. Today, you are not a citizen unless you are granted citizenship through a legal mechanism like being born on the soil in a juice solely country or having parents who are citizens in a juice sanguine country. United States citizenship is probably the most highly sought after citizenship in the world. And one of the many reasons for this is what is called America's civil religion. Now, there are many reasons people want to be citizens of the United States. They want to be Americans because of the high prestige of America and the world or because of the usefulness of a U.S. passport. But there's also a big attraction of America's civil religion, of the symbols that represent America, some of them very serious, like the Statue of Liberty, some of them taken very seriously even though they are not very meaningful in themselves, like the flag that all Americans pledge allegiance to as children. But then some of them may seem even silly, for example, Superman as a symbol of American citizenship. It is no coincidence that in science fiction movies, whenever the world needs saving from an alien race, there's an expectation that it's the United States that will do the saving. There's very much a faith in America, a kind of quasi-religious faith that not only Americans have, but many people around the world who aspire to be Americans. And really one of the very special and different things about America that distinguishes America from other countries is that when somebody accepts those symbols, that person comes to be fully accepted as an American. So I think in many ways, if a Chinese person moves to Australia and gains Australian citizenship, that person with a thick accent who doesn't speak English very well and who has customs that are very much Chinese customs might not be accepted as being fully Australian by other people in the country. However, in the United States, no matter how thick the person's accent and no matter what kinds of foods the person might eat or what TV shows the person might watch, merely by embracing the symbols of Americanness, that person comes to be accepted as part of the imagined community of the United States. Key takeaways. First, democracy requires an imagined community of people who share citizenship in a collective democratic project. Second, countries in the Americas tend to grant Jewish-Soli citizenship while the rest of the world uses Jewish sanguiness. It should also be remembered that Jewish-Soli is the broader term. People who are children of citizens are still granted citizenship even in Jewish-Soli countries. You don't have to be born on the territory itself. And finally, the civil religion of the United States is perhaps the ultimate expression of the nation as imagined community and a major reason why the United States is so influential in the world since so many people who are not yet or maybe even have no hope of becoming citizens of the United States nonetheless aspire to American citizenship because it is possible to join the American-imagined community in a way that it is not really possible to join the imagined community of Germany or Ghana if you are someone who is not of the ethnic origin of people from those countries. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at SalvaturbaBonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.