To What Extent Did Peasants Become Citizens by Wwi?

“To what extent had European peasants become citizens by World War I?”

Citizenship has always been a hard-to-define concept. Philosophers and other thinkers, from Antiquity to the contemporary world, have always paid special attention to this question that affects the principles of individual identity. In a broad definition, it is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, national, or human resource community that has rights and responsibilities to comply with that community. A more pragmatic definition is provided by Oxford Dictionary: a citizen is a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized. 1

We are now constantly bombarded by news employing the word 'citizen' in every occasion possible: Are Syrian citizen journalists embellishing the thruth? 2, Baird presents honorary Canadian citizenship to Suu Kyi...3 It seems to be a rather well-spread term now, but although the concept can be traced back to ancient Israelites5 and was extensively scrutinised by Greek philosophers, the term citizen as we currently understand did not become a reality until relatively recent times – in fact, it could be argued that citizenship is still not a reality in many current states.4

It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the emergence of citizenship in modern Europe as opposed to the former oppressed peasantry and the degree in which it had become a reality before the First World War. We will see that the core ideas of its development were partially based on experiences from Antiquity, as well as on other relevant thinkers in western tradition, especially after the Middle Ages. It will be argued that the materialisation of these ideas did not become a possible until the intellectual contributions of the French Revolution and the new ideals that emerged as a result of the creation of the United States of America. Finally, we will discuss to what extent the result of these theories became a...