Citizenship and territorial order: a path starting from the case of the postnati (1608)

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptualization of political space as a territorial order at the origins of the modern state and its connection to the discourse on citizenship. By drawing on the discussion of the jurist Edward Coke in the famous Calvin’s case (1608), the analysis focuses on the bond that the legal reasoning builds between the principle of jus soli and the rule of conquest governing the expansion of common law. Although a wide-ranging legal and political literature referred to Calvin’s case with regards to the debates about citizenship, the interconnection between these two juridical principles has rarely been directly addressed. By adopting such an approach, the article sheds light on two critical issues in the construction of the territorial order of citizenship. First of all, it investigates the artificial character that modern political space necessarily acquires in the light of its representation as an homogeneous and conceptually unified space. In order to do so, the article critically addresses the literature which appealed to ‘natural law’ as the founding principle of jus soli, and focuses on the reformulation of the medieval theory of sovereignty around the figures of the King’s two bodies. Secondly, the analysis shows how modern territorial order has expanded through ‘oppositions’ and through the projecting beyond the boundaries constructed around the homogeneous and unified space of the ‘subject’ destined to become ‘citizen’.