115.4
Creating Citizens: How State Produces Persons (1945-2011)
The birth of modern society follows structural pluralism and many forms of social differentiation. Processes of state formation are dealing with the population and their new personnel. But who or what is the population? How does the state address individuals? What are patterns of membership and belonging when individuals become persons i.e. citizens?
Using a historical perspective through the lens of classification and social knowledge the contribution will discuss the “making up people” (Hacking 2002) within the formation of nation state’s political system. It will be shown that legal classification and categorization are state practices in order to address people and to distribute resources. These persons are reflecting structural changes and they can be used as a key to open modern society’s self-discriptions.
In the first step (1) beginning at 1945 the historical sequences will be sketched to reconstruct the legal paths of the cases Hungary, The Czechoslovak Republic, Ireland and Netherlands. In the second step (2) some common and some historic-specific persons with their interfering social dimensions (i.e. nation, ethnicity, sex or economy etc.) will be presented and compared. Against this background (3) using the heuristic differentiation of citizen/non-citizen major shifts of the meaning of political membership and belonging will be shown. Finally (4), the approach focuses analytically the creation of persons in a macro sociological context and votes for a view on the transnational level of the EU.