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The German Concept of Citizenship Ulrich First Draft (August 1998) The German Concept of Citizenship Ulrich Preuss I. Citizen and Burgher D Staatsbürger and Stadtbürger Whenever the German concept of citizenship is under study, the authors do not fail to hint to the etymological particularity that the German language lacks a term which manifests the roots of the concept in the city: etymologically the terms citizen, citoyen, cittadino and ciudades evidently point to some kind of belonging to the city. In the German language the analogous term is Staatsbürger. Kant, for instance, made it clear that when he spoke of the Bürger, he meant the "citoyen, d.i. Staatsbürger, nicht Stadtbürger, bourgeois". Equally Wieland, to whom the first usage of the German term Staatsbürger is frequently attributed, at least three different expressions: Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit, and Volksangehörigkeit express different elements of a status which, at least in the anglo-american tradition, is covered by the single word citizenship. If the political and juridical language uses certain distinctions it is safe to assume that they reflect significant material differences. The German triad Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit, and Volksangehörigkeit invokes the concepts of the 'state' and of the 'people' (Staat and Volk) and combines them with the term 'belonging' (Zugehörigkeit, Angehörigkeit), thus suggesting an affiliation of passive inclusion between the individual and the society rather than of active participation. Hence, when the German concept of citizenship is under scrutiny one should keep in mind that certain aspects of citizenship which are incorporated in a single concept in other countries may be disjoined in the German case and associated with separate terms and perhaps even different conceptions. However, despite this variety of terms D which a few years ago was supplemented by the new-fashioned term Staatszugehörigkeit for the class of second generation immigrants who were granted a conditional option for German citizenship D the central term for what is named citizenship, citoyenneté, cittadinanza etc. in other languages is Staatsbürgerschaft in German. Before Kant, who linked the Staatsbürger to the citoyen and to the French Revolution, this term did not play a significant political role in the German political and judidical reasoning. Until the French Revolution the Staatsbürger was not, as the term suggests, the Bürger of the state in the same sense as the civis had been the Bürger of the towns and cities, but the state subject. Staatsbürgerschaft and subjecthood to the state were not incompatible. As we shall see, subjecthood became the necessary precondition for the evolvement of Staatsbürgerschaft. The political thrust of subjecthood was not directed against the absolutist power of the state, but against the particularistic forms of estatist dependency. In the prerevolutionary 18th century Staatsbürgerschaft had the meaning of generalized state subjecthood. In the most prominent document of the enlightened German absolutism which survived the French Revolution, the Allgemeine Landrecht für die PreuŸischen Staaten (ALR) (The General Law of the Land for the Prussian States) of 1794 the term Staatsbürger was not used; obviously the term did not only include the anti-estatist individualistic meaning of equal subjecthood to the state D a meaning which was of course approved by the absolutist regime D but simultaneously the claim to some kind of active participation, which, equally a matter of course, was an extremely unwelcome dimension. Thus, the ALR which one may well regard as a kind of constitution of the Prussian societas civilis vel politica on its way to a bourgeois society and its dichotomy of state and society tried to reconcile the modern- egalitarian elements of the Prussian enlightened absolutism with its social conservatism. Thus, whenever a legal regulation pertains to the individuals in their quality as subjects of the state they are categorizeed as the inhabitants or the members of the state, sometimes as its subjects (Einwohner or Mitglieder des Staates, or Untertanen); in any case they were viewed as individuals who incarnate the basic elements of the state engendered society. The egalitarian implications of this individualistic conception of society were expressed concisely in ¤ 22 to the Introduction of the ALR: "The laws of the state associate all its members, irrespective of their estatist distinctions or their differences of rank and gender". One might expect that this association of state members metamorphosed subjects into Bürger and gave way to an incipient variant of a nation of Staatsbürgern, i.e., a political association of equal citizens (citoyens, Staatsbürger) who had transcended the status of a corporation of passive subjects. But this was not the case. When the ALR assigned an entire chapter to the category of Bürger, it referred to the estatist order of the society within in which the Bürger formed one estate among others. Thus, the title of the relevant chapter reads 'On the estate of the burghers' (Vom Bürgerstande), and it defines this estate negatively as comprising all inhabitants of the state who according to their birth do not belong to either the nobility or the estate of the peasants. The burgher proper is the resident of a town who has been acquired membership of the municipal community. There are still other categories of persons classified under the title 'Vom Bürgerstande' like the 'exempted' (a kind of privileged subjects), or the burghers who have acquired a noble estate (Rittergut); they are of no interest for our analysis. What concerns us here is the general observation that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century D despite the French Revolution and despite the quite influential writings of Kant D in Germany the concept of citizenship was a mere philosophical idea. It had not yet acquired political or social reality. The status of the individuals vis-à-vis their political authority was embodied in the concept of subjecthood, whilst the idea of the citizen was hidden in the estatist conception of the burgher, i.e. a kind of corporatist-municipal membership. The proviso "not yet" does not mean that the German concept of citizenship was a backward version of the French model and therefore destined to imitate the latter's development with a certain time lag. Apart from serious methodological objections which historians would raise against this hidden metaphysics of history Germany's development in the age of absolutism hardly suggests a history of the concept of citizenship following the French track. Germany's entry into modernity was essentially shaped by the traumatic experience of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 which determined the country's socioeconomic, cultural, and political development up to our days. While France rose to a compact and D gauged by the standards of the time D closed, homogeneous, territorially bound, centralized, and absolutist state power during the 17th century, Germany was the core component of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. II. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation The name of this political entity was as strange as its structure. After the collapse of the Roman Empire (anno 476 A.C.) its universalist claim to embody civilized humankind was preserved by the Popes who regarded the Roman Empire as the precursor of the Christian Empire which included all Christian peoples and guaranteed a universal peace order. Originally the early fathers transferred the imperial power (translatio imperii) to the Franconians (through the solemn coronation of Emperor Charlemagne in 800 A.C.), but eventually - since the installation of Otto the Great in 962 - the imperial power rested with German dynasties until the downfall of the empire in 1806. The empire was regarded as the continuation of the Roman Empire, while the attribute 'holy' (Sacrum Imperium) was added in the 13th century in order to emphasize its sacred dignity vis-á-vis the Church. The other qualification D Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation D was added in the 15th century in order to designate the German parts of the transnational Empire; however, gradually this attribute came to record the claim of the Germans to the imperial authority. The basic idea of the Empire was its supranationality D it included territories and peoples from Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Burgundy D and, closely connected with this quality, its spiritual and institutional affiliation with the Roman Church whose secular sword it was supposed to be. The memorability of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation for Germany follows from the particular role which it played in the development of the German nation-state. While the medieval political entities which were not part of the Empire D as for instance England, France, Spain, the United Provinces [later: the Netherlands], or the Swiss Confederation D underwent a process of transformation into modern statehood in the course of modernization, the Holy Roman Empire never became a state in the modern sense of this concept. The Westphalian Peace Treaty of 1648 which factually became the basic law of the empire did not change the basically premodern, i.e. estatist character of its constitution. Thus, the empire never acquired sovereign power, i.e., according to the criteria first developed by Bodin, supreme and undivided authority over a delineated territory and its inhabitants. The imperial power was embedded in a system of estatist bargainings (in which election capitulations played
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