Keywords

Keywords—HIST 315

Statuses

- citizen
- national
- resident
- person
- native

- subject
- protected person

- denizen
- naturalized person

- alien
- foreigner
- stateless
- vagrant

Categories

- political
- economic
- cultural
- military
- legal

- civil
- social
- public/private
- medical

Arms of the state

- emancipation
- suffrage
- military service
- taxation

- law and codification
- education
- census
- registration of identity
- passports
- visas
- currency
- public health

Concepts

- universality
- unitary
- equality
- leveling

- territory
- borders
- mobility
- settlement
- domicile
- mercantilism (population)
- naturalization
- sojourn

- rights
- duties/obligations

- community
- ethnicity
- language
- tradition

- revolution
- constitution

- idea
- practice

- jus soli
- jus sanguinis

- metropole
- empire

- modernity
- rationality
- identification
- bureaucratization

- elites
- ordinary people

- social closure

- dual nationality

Sample exam questions

This exercise is optional.  Choose one question from the list. In your response, discuss at least three historical examples.  Write no longer than one hour.  Submit your answers, in person or by email, before Thursday November 29.  I will return them on Wednesday, December 5.

1. Political citizenship disappears where democracy is absent. Agree or disagree.

2. Which comes first, nationality or citizenship?

3. In the context of nationality and citizenship, do ideas make practices or do practices make ideas?

4. Modern state practices create equality between individuals. Agree or disagree.

Passport power

Here are two tools for evaluating the power of different nationalities.  The Henley Visa Restrictions Index ranks nationalities by the number of states that permit entry without a visa purchased in advance.  Continental Airlines, meanwhile, offers a handy tool that it uses to permit or restrict access to flights.  Enter your nationality, departure state and destination, and discover your fate.

Israel mulls citizenship changes (from BBC)

Israel’s interior minister calls for reforming the law that grants Jews around the world Israeli citizenship. Full story here.

Swiss election poster

Here is the image to which Molly referred. Friendly! The Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) party that produced this poster won more seats than any other single party in the Swiss elections held ten days ago. It received 29% of votes cast, with the second-place party ten points behind. The party’s platform focuses in part on an association between immigrants and criminality.  Among other measures, it proposes expelling the families of immigrants convicted of crime.

Quebec citizenship and reasonable accommodations

Pauline Marois, new leader of the Parti Quebecois, has table legislation in the National Assembly that would create a new type of status: Quebec citizen. This bill ties certain political rights (notably the right to run for office and the right to petition the government) to fulfillment of a cultural responsibility (developing competence in the language of the province). Some details here (from the Gazette, which never fails to disappoint). The coverage in other papers is more interesting, but this story gives you the basic idea. The proposal feeds into the current maelstrom about reasonable accommodation. (For those who aren’t aware, a commission is touring the province holding public hearings concerning the adjustments society should make to accommodate the needs of ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities). All of these debates touch on questions we treat in class.

Flashy documents

Here is an amusing anecdote about archival research and the powers of a shiny passport.

Naturalization in Switzerland

The BBC posted this article about Swiss naturalization a few weeks ago.  The law:

Switzerland has Europe’s toughest naturalisation laws. Foreigners must live for 12 years in a Swiss community before they can apply, and being born in Switzerland brings no right to citizenship.

More remarkably, towns and villages vote on the naturalization of individuals.  Strong political rights for some…

Wikipedia quality control

It seems that our wikipedia experiences are the result of a concerted drive to improve its quality. Details here.