Is there a particular German concept of citizenship, and if so, what is special about it? The author argues that Germany's belated transformation into a territorial nation-state and the complex relationship between statehood and nationhood in the country's history have strongly shaped its dominant notion of citizenship. While in a long process starting in the thirteenth century in other European countries like France, England, and Spain the idea of nation became associated with the emerging ius territoriale (which in France in the seventeenth century became to be called the droit de souverainete) , this did not happen in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The dissociation of the German Empire from the process of state formation entailed a concept of the German nation which lacked an inherent connection to the idea of political nationhood associated with statehood and, concomitantly, with a demarcated territory. As a consequence, the idea of a German nation emigrated into the sphere of culture and gave the German ethnos a prominent role in the concept of nationhood. When in 1871 finally Bismarck founded a modern German nation-state, this state was not the body politic of all German-speaking people; the German polity and the German nation were not congruous. The idea of German citizenship mirrors these particularities of the German national history. It is characterized, inter alia , by the separation of citizenship from nationality, the distinction between nationality and ethnic belonging (' Staatsangehorigkeit' as distinct from ' Volk sangehorigkeit') , and the emphasis on the cultural and the social dimension of citizenship rather than on its political significance. Ironically, the tradition of Germany's fragmented set-up (federalism, bi-confessionalism) and the weakness of the political dimension of its concept of citizenship promotes the Germans' willingness to accept European citizenship as a largely unproblematic kind of supranational identity.
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