The meaning of citizenship remains the ultimate test of who belongs in a country

For more than 2,000 years citizenship has represented society’s answer to one of its oldest and most enduring questions: who belongs?

Perhaps the greatest modern misconception is that citizenship is principally about migration. Historically, it has mostly been about membership. Migration concerns movement across borders. Citizenship determines membership of the national community. Citizenship is ultimately society’s way of deciding who holds a stake in its future. Unsurprisingly, every society has answered that question differently.

The history of citizenship is therefore not the history of a single legal identifier gradually replacing another. It is the history of societies continually searching for legal expressions of belonging, through participation, birth, descent and increasingly through integration.

From the polis to the nation-state

For Aristotle, the citizen was one who took part in the deliberative and judicial administration of the polis. Citizenship was not passive residence, it was active membership of the political community, carrying responsibilities alongside rights. Modern democracies continue to distinguish citizenship from every other form of lawful presence because citizenship remains the principal gateway to political participation.

Rome did not abandon that idea but rather expanded it. The Constitutio Antoniniana, issued by Emperor Caracalla in AD 212, illustrates that citizenship had already evolved beyond participation alone. By extending Roman citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the Empire, Rome recognised that membership could be expressed through legal allegiance to a political community far larger than the city-state itself. Citizenship conferred protection, status and obligations across an increasingly diverse political community.

The emergence of the modern nation-state transformed citizenship once again. Political participation remained central, but nationality increasingly became associated with territory, sovereign allegiance and enduring legal membership. Nationality laws gradually developed around familiar connecting factors: jus soli, jus sanguinis and naturalisation; not because one displaced another, but because evolving societies continued their search for the most appropriate legal expression of belonging.

Globalisation renews an ancient question

The 21st century has brought renewed urgency to that enduring enquiry. Globalisation has not altered the question of who belongs, but it has required democracies to confront it more frequently. As transnational mobility and diaspora communities have become increasingly significant features of modern society, long-established legal markers of membership have come under renewed examination.

Across jurisdictions, an emerging pattern has become difficult to ignore. Countries that appeared settled in their approaches to citizenship are once again examining the assumptions that have long underpinned nationality law. Is birth alone sufficient? Can citizenship by descent extend indefinitely across generations? Does prolonged residence necessarily establish membership? To what extent should participation, integration or an enduring connection with the state influence the recognition of citizenship?

It is within this broader context that the contemporary experiences of the US, Italy, Spain and, increasingly, South Africa become particularly instructive.

The same question, different answers

The US continues to illustrate the enduring significance of jus soli. In June 2026, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment protects the citizenship of children born within the territory irrespective of the immigration status of their parents. It reaffirmed birth as the legal expression through which the US has historically recognised membership of the national community.

More fundamentally, the decision reaffirmed an important principle: that the legal position of a child should not ordinarily be determined by the immigration status of the parents.

South Africa has, in its own way, entered the same conversation from a markedly different starting point. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2010 amended section 4(3) of the Citizenship Act by postponing a child’s entitlement to claim South African citizenship until attaining the age of 18, provided that the child born in South Africa ordinarily resided in the Republic from birth until attaining that age. The Amended Citizenship Regulations of 7 July 2023 introduced a further qualification by restricting that pathway to children born of parents who were lawfully admitted into South Africa. In doing so, South Africa has increasingly linked a child’s eventual pathway to citizenship to the immigration status of the parents.

Both approaches illustrate that democracies are increasingly reassessing the relationship between migration, status and the legal recognition of membership.

Descent, participation and the question of connection

Italy, by contrast, has reopened debate around jus sanguinis. For generations, Italian nationality law recognised citizenship through an unbroken line of descent, reflecting the understanding that family, culture and national identity could survive long after migration had taken place. Recent reforms seek to recalibrate that principle by strengthening the requirement for a more immediate connection with Italy itself.

Again, South Africa has adopted a markedly different legislative approach. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2010 reclassified children born outside the Republic to South African parents as citizens by birth, placing them on the same legal footing as children born within South Africa. Rather than narrowing the significance of parentage as a legal marker of membership, the amendment reinforced the enduring relationship between citizenship and parentage, irrespective of where birth occurred.

States are entitled to ensure that citizenship reflects a genuine and enduring relationship rather than becoming a document acquired solely for convenience. Yet geographical distance alone may not always determine whether that relationship continues to exist. Culture, language, family identity and shared history often survive across generations despite physical separation from the country of origin. The debate, therefore, is not whether ancestry matters, but whether ancestry alone can indefinitely sustain legal membership of the national community.

Spain illustrates a different legal expression altogether, its Integration and Citizenship Plan places increasing emphasis upon participation. In many respects, this returns to one of Aristotle’s oldest insights: participation in public life remains one of the most enduring expressions of membership.

No single answer

Taken together, these examples reveal a remarkable pattern. Democracies are not converging upon a single model of citizenship. Birth, blood and participation each recognise a different relationship between the individual and the state. None is inherently complete. Each represents a different answer to the same enduring question.

South Africa’s own recent constitutional and policy developments demonstrate that it is not merely observing this global reassessment of citizenship but actively contributing to it.

In May 2025, the Constitutional Court reaffirmed the constitutional significance of South African citizenship, holding that citizenship cannot automatically cease through the voluntary acquisition of another nationality. Although decided in a different context, the judgment reflects an important constitutional principle: citizenship is not merely an administrative status, but an enduring legal relationship between the individual and the state. Once recognised, that relationship cannot lightly be diminished or extinguished.

The conversation has since moved beyond the retention of citizenship to its future acquisition. Cabinet’s approval of the Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection signals a willingness to reconsider how South Africa should recognise membership of its national community. Rather than relying predominantly upon residence as the principal gateway to naturalisation, the proposed framework contemplates a broader assessment of an applicant’s relationship with the Republic through multiple criteria, including contribution, integration and other indicators of an enduring connection.

Whether those proposals ultimately find their way into legislation remains to be seen. Their significance lies elsewhere as they reflect an acknowledgement that belonging may not always be adequately captured by a single legal marker. Otherwise, objective qualification risks yielding to subjective assessment, and legal membership becomes dependent upon administrative discretion rather than principled decision-making.

The enduring quest for belonging

The debate no longer asks whether birth, descent or participation should prevail; it asks whether modern societies have reached a point where no single legal marker can adequately explain belonging, and perhaps the search for one answer has always been misguided.

For more than two millennia, societies have asked the same question, yet none has answered it in precisely the same way. Today’s democracies are reconsidering each of those legal markers in light of unprecedented mobility, changing identities and increasingly interconnected societies.

That is not evidence that citizenship has lost its meaning, rather it is evidence that it has retained it. It is about recognising that belonging has always been more complex than any single legal criterion can fully capture. The enduring challenge for nationality law is not choosing one to the exclusion of all others but determining how they should be balanced within a principled and constitutionally coherent framework.

Citizenship has never been society’s way of deciding who may cross its borders. It has always been society’s way of deciding who holds a stake in its future. DM