Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning Marshall Revisited: The Sequence of Citizenship Rights in the Twenty-first Century I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’ 1 IN WESTERN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA, THE PROCESS OF EXTENDING citizenship rights varied much with regard to both the time of initia- tion and the length and scope. Nonetheless, the developed or first world countries basically reached the same general terminus: liberal democracy concomitant with some kind of a welfare state. Or, to use the tripartite division of citizenship rights suggested by T. H. Marshall in his seminal essay, Citizenship and Social Class, they ended up with the bounded whole of civil, political and social rights. According to Marshall, there was a systematic sequencing to this development. In gist, civil liberties preceded political rights which then preceded social rights. This sequencing was so clear-cut that Marshall fixed it exactly on the temporal dimension. To quote: ‘it is possible, without doing too much violence to historical accuracy, to assign the formative period in the life of each to a different century – civil rights to the eighteenth, political to the nineteenth and social to the twentieth.’ 2 Even though Marshall focused exclusively on the history of Great Britain in his essay, much indicates that he did regard this evolution as typical of the capitalist West as a whole. 3 Moreover, others have 1 In Robert Frost, Mountain Interval, New York, Henry Holt, 1921, p. 9. 2 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, London, Pluto, 1996 [1949], p. 10. 3 See Michael Mann, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, in Martin Bulmer and Anthony Reeve (eds), Citizenship Today, London, UCL Press, 1996, ch. 7. Government and Opposition, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 457–483, 2010 doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2010.01326.x © The Authors 2010. Government and Opposition © 2010 Government and Opposition Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.