The national dimension of citizenship in T.H. Marshall

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.