Citizenship is generally used as a synonym for nationality (see: Nationality). Where citizenship is used in a different sense from nationality, it refers to the legal rights and obligations of persons associated with nationality under national law. In some national legislations, citizenship has a more specific meaning and refers to rights and obligations that can only be exercised after the age of majority (e.g. the right to vote) or to rights and obligations that can only be exercised within the national territory. Although there is disagreement about when the citizenship relationship began, many thinkers point to the early city-states of ancient Greece, perhaps in response to the fear of slavery, although others see it primarily as a modern phenomenon dating back only a few hundred years. In Roman times, citizenship began to take on the character of a law-based relationship, with less political participation than in ancient Greece, but an expanding sphere of who was considered a citizen. In the Middle Ages in Europe, citizenship was mainly identified with commercial and secular life in growing cities, and it was seen as belonging to emerging nation-states. In modern democracies, citizenship has opposite meanings, including a liberal-individualist view that emphasizes needs and demands and legal protection for essentially passive political beings, and a bourgeois-republican vision that emphasizes political participation and views citizenship as an active relationship with specific privileges and obligations. When the Western Roman Empire was founded in 476 AD. [29] the western part ruled by Rome was plundered, while the Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople, endured.
Some thinkers suggest that Western Europe evolved due to historical circumstances with two competing sources of authority – religious and secular – and that the subsequent separation of church and state was an “important step” in producing the modern sense of citizenship. [7] In the surviving eastern half, religious and secular authority were merged into a single emperor. The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, who ruled the Eastern Empire from 527 to 565, believed that citizenship meant that people lived with honor, did no harm, and “gave everyone their right” over their fellow citizens. [2] [30] Other thinkers repeat that citizenship is a vortex for competing ideas and currents that sometimes work against each other, sometimes work in harmony. For example, the sociologist T. H.