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Group identity: unless you are born in Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen is a long and involved process.

Article Excerpt
Citizenship as we know it is tied tightly to democracy. In states operated as absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, Brunei) or dictatorships (North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba) the people may be citizens but they are without fights. They certainly can't change their government and they must give their allegiance to a single leader. They have little protection from being jailed or even executed at the whim of their leader. Such states are the remnants of what used to be the dominant form of social organization.

There have been a number of false starts towards what we think of as citizenship today. During the time of the lawmaker and poet Solon (639-559 BCE) the idea of citizenship first appeared in Ancient Greece.

There was another flowering of the concept during the early Roman Republic several decades after Solon's death. In 507 BCE, the Roman monarchy was abolished when ordinary folk pressed for and got rights previously enjoyed only by a privileged class.

During the late 11th and early 12th centuries communities were set up in Italian city-states where democracy and citizenship briefly took root. None of these examples lasted long. Dictators and monarchs seized back the power that had been taken from them. The ordinary people went back to their miserable condition of oppression.

The most recent outbreak of democracy and citizenship came with the French Revolution (1789-99). Peasants, wage-earners, and a growing middle class were finding life a real struggle. At the same time, the extravagant lifestyles of French monarchs and nobles had run the country into massive debt.

Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and David Hume were writing about remodeling the way states worked. Their ideas were part of what historians call The Enlightenment. They called for power to be transferred into the hands of the people from unelected kings and queens and the church.

Inspired by the...