Confrontation and Conflict

The First World War revealed an existential dimension of citizenship that remains hidden in peacetime. Hostilities between states intensify the politico-social significance of citizenship and raise awareness of citizens’ duty to put their lives at risk for the good of their home country. The war introduced an epoch in which the political and social importance of citizenship in the everyday lives of Europeans increased greatly, as did, however, its delimiting and exclusionary impact as well. The extreme depletion of the reservoir of—male—conscripts sharpened the dividing line between the sexes and, during large-scale conquests, incited conflicts between ethnic and national loyalties, between ethnicity and nationality, as was seen, for example, in the areas occupied by Germany in France and Russia. The emerging European civil war, which would become a world civil war, had one of its battlefields in the immensely contradictory and conflict-ridden history of citizenship.