The project examines the history of Europe in the 20th century from the viewpoint of citizenship, a key legal institution whose social impacts have profoundly marked European societies. The lead question is whether the development of citizenship in European nation-states set diverging national and regional paths or offered the prospect of convergence in the long term. Six countries in Western and Eastern Europe compared: France, Germany, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia/Soviet Union. The project questions three dominant views in research. First, it critically examines the postulate that citizenship in Western Europe has developed on the basis of political and territorial criteria in contrast to Eastern Europe, where ethnic and cultural criteria have come to bear. Secondly, the thesis is advanced that the development of citizenship is determined less by lastingly stable concepts of nation than by rapid change in political and economic constellations. Thirdly, national historical interpretations of citizenship are confronted by the assumption that (post-)colonial and metropolitan hierarchies of civil rights are strongly interdependent.