'Citizenship' presents itself as a flexible scheme, capable of addressing the problem of the relationship between the subject and the political community in very different historical contexts. It can be applied to pre-modern societies (to the Greek polis as well as to the medieval civitas), it can be referred to the process of constituting modern statehood, and it can finally help to focus on today's crisis of the state form, which currently seems threatened by the formation of new supra-state structures (UE), no less than by widespread 'federalist' demands.

Questioning citizenship in this perspective means asking how the prerogatives, burdens, obligations, rights, and duties of a subject have been defined in different historical contexts. Not an abstract, imaginary subject, but a subject rooted in a specific political-legal order.

The educational material handed out in class