One of Marshall's most memorable maxims casts citizenship as a ‘status extended to all those who are full members of the community’ (1950 [1992], p 18, also p 6). The key reference here – to community – remains somewhat obscure (it is worth noting that Marshall sometimes seems to use it interchangeably with ‘society’); it has attracted surprisingly little detailed analysis. I focus on Marshall's depiction of equality as a defining feature of democratic community membership, that is, of citizenship. Marshall treats ‘equality’ as a social-political construction, that is, as the product of norms emerging from social interaction as well as explicit political negotiation. As a consequence, we find Marshall arguing from an explicitly egalitarian perspective that citizenship endorses ‘legitimate inequalities’, underscoring once more the paradoxical quality of his analysis. And he consistently finds a significant role for social meaning and perceptions when analysing its ‘spatial’ – that is territorialgeographical and membership – dimensions. That begs an important question about how we make sense of changes in citizenship, and its social meaning, over time. This issue is of some political significance, as part of the attraction of citizenship discourses – and particularly the sense of inviolability that attaches to citizenship ‘rights’ – is as a resource for those seeking to resist welfare retrenchment. To the extent that these rights are rooted in a social consensus they may be more vulnerable to change than advocates and analysts of citizenship seem to believe. The UK is playing this out now, with arguments about devolution, citizenship and the fate of the welfare state constantly edging closer together.

Territory

Territorial politics provides a partially hidden subtext to Marshall's analysis. Only rarely does it break the surface of his narrative, but it is a key theme running through and animating his account. On one of the rare moments when it does come into view, Marshall depicts the politics of citizenship as a process of nationalisation. The crucial passage runs as follows: ‘the citizenship whose history I wish to trace is, by definition, national. Its evolution involved a double process of fusion and of separation. The fusion was geographical, the separation functional’ (1950 [1992], p 9). Marshall's vision of nationalisation was, in fact, essentially a process of delocalisation. In effect, he contrasts earlier, functionally integrated, but locally specific, bundles of benefits and duties with national citizenship that may be functionally differentiated, but is, he implies, geographically uniform.