nationality vs citizenship

Nationality versus citizenship[edit]

An immigration inspection sign at Shanghai Pudong International Airport with the English term "Chinese nationals" and the Chinese term for "Chinese citizens (中國公民)".

Conceptually citizenship and nationality are different dimensions of state membership. Citizenship is focused on the internal political life of the state and nationality is the dimension of state membership in international law.^[33] Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to nationality.^[34] As such nationality in international law can be called and understood as citizenship,^[34] or more generally as subject or belonging to a sovereign state, and not as ethnicity. This notwithstanding, around 10 million people are stateless.^[34]

In the contemporary era, the concept of full citizenship encompasses not only active political rights, but full civil rights and social rights.^[9]

Historically, the most significant difference between a national and a citizen is that the citizen has the right to vote for elected officials, and the right to be elected.^[9] This distinction between full citizenship and other, lesser relationships goes back to antiquity. Until the 19th and 20th centuries, it was typical for only a certain percentage of people who belonged to the state to be considered as full citizens. In the past, a number of people were excluded from citizenship on the basis of sex, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, religion, and other factors. However, they held a legal relationship with their government akin to the modern concept of nationality.