Citizenship and Authenticity

The text tries to bring a different point of view on what citizenship is and what it means, other than political or legal interpretation. It searches for pre-political and pre-legal basis of citizenship able to protect its rights and freedoms as defined by, for example, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms or as legally guaranteed in democracies. The theoretical part of the text is based on treatises of Czechoslovak dissidents who examined the phenomenon of citizenship, being themselves citizens of illiberal regime. The treatises originate mainly in the 1970s and look at the citizen through the eyes of the dissent of "normalised" Czechoslovakia. The view is broadened by further interviews focusing on the topic of citizenship with three more dissidents. The goal is to find what citizenship should carry within, what it should mean in order to be able to defend its space, the space which officially belongs to it in democratic conditions