Were then excluded from full citizenship, if I may say so,
on the one hand, women, who were given the right to vote only in 1946,
minors from 18 to 21 years of age,
as today and since 1974, minors have the right to vote
from the age of 18 years,
the mentally ill, people with criminal convictions
accompanied by loss of civil rights,
and also part of the population of the colonies.
Let us not forget that equality of rights in the area,
in Algeria, then a French department, was only obtained in 1947.
There was a Second Committee for the muslim populations
in this territory, and other nationals of the colonies
did not have the possibility to become citizens,
without even mentioning slavery, which ran until 1848.
One could therefore be a national without being a citizen,
or be a citizen without being a national,
but the collusion, if I may say so, between citizenship and nationality
nevertheless came with the Third Republic,
as it was considered that the two were inseparable,
and when voting rights for foreigners were further debated,
constitutionalists in France considered it impossible, unthinkable,
to dissociate citizenship from nationality.
It has been done, however, as on the one hand,
already by the mid-70s, a number of European coutries
such as Greece, Sweden in 1975, the Netherlands in 1985,
and Denmark in 1981, gave the right to vote
and local eligibility to the citizens, thus dissociating citizenship
from nationality for local life, and on the other hand,
because the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which defines European citizenship
in its article 8, precisely grants the right to vote
and local eligibility to Europeans from the European Union
who live in another country than the one of their nationality.
This is a very important element of this new definition,
and, as we see, it is immigration
that brought about this transformation.
Another transformation, the content of citizenship itself.
Many civic demands from the 70s and 80s
concern the fight against discriminations,
to such an extent that the Forum of Migrants, in Brussels,
proposed what became in 2000
a EU anti-discrimination directive,
therefore legally binding in all EU countries.
Those who preceded us in this domain are the British,
who created the Commission for Racial Equality as early as 1976,
and who were particularly interested in the implementation of the rights.
It is not just a matter of stating the rights, as we do in France,
but also of monitoring their implementation,
and when it comes to discrimination, the difficulty lies precisely
in the implementation of a number of principles that are enacted.
Fight against discriminations, but also diversity.
The notion of diversity was gradually introduced
in the content of citizenship in European countries,
on the one hand, by a certain number of demands and cultural events
carried by immigration, and today we talk about a Europe of diversity.
Europe even celebrated this notion of cultural diversity
in a formal manner in 2008 by emphasizing
both the cultural diversity of European countries
and their internal diversity, by showing that immigration
is also part of this notion and contributes to the definition
of what Europeans are today. So, diversity today
is associated with citizenship, it is hard to be defined
as a public or private corporate citizen
without emphasizing diversity in recruitment,
in the people who are part of it, and so on,
and therefore, today, it is an integral value
of modern citizenship.
The same goes regarding mobility,
the fact that the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 focuses on the rights
of the European citizen, and for the most part
on freedom of movement, of work, and of establishment,
and a few other rights, which are to refer to the European Ombudsman,
or to the European Court of Justice, to be represented
in a state other than one's own
in case one's own state does not have an embassy.
These are related to mobility, and mobility is part of the new values
of this modern citizenship, and we are therefore far removed
from the very autochthonous definition of the citizenship-nationality
of the Third Republic, and today it is thanks to immigration,
and very much so, that the legal and philosophical content
of citizenship has transformed.
