Since ancient Greece, citizenship has been a precious status both the political community and the individual. Citizenship has traditionally been a privilege as well as a burden. Citizens constitute the demos and serve as a resource for the state by paying taxes and serving in the military. Therefore, membership of a political community implies special political obligations for the individual, but also secures them important negative and positive rights. As Thomas Humphrey Marshall pointed out in the 1950s, citizenship in democratic countries implies access to civil, political, and welfare rights. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt (1951) noted, only a few years after the creation of the United Nations, access to human rights cannot be guaranteed without citizenship in a sovereign state.
In the years since the Second World War and even more since the end of the Cold War, citizenship in the developed world has increasingly become an asset. The traditional political obligations implied in citizenship have diminished, while the rights component of membership has expanded significantly. In most countries, taxes are paid by all residents rather than citizens alone. Military service has been outsourced to volunteers who, in some cases, include non-citizens. While the obligations of citizenship have been hollowed out, citizenship still secures important and valuable opportunities for individuals.
In the contemporary world, citizenship is the best predictor of well-being. To paraphrase Ayelet Shachar, being born with citizenship in a developed Western country amounts to winning the ‘birth right lottery’ (Shachar, 2009) as far as opportunity and well-being are concerned. Unsurprisingly, individuals born without the citizenship of a first world country make desperate efforts to gain such a status for themselves and their descendants.
Whilst dual citizenship has until recently been seen as an anomaly, in past decades an increasing number of states have begun to tolerate multiple citizenship. In countries with a high level of immigration, the toleration of dual citizenship is partly the result of said immigration. Selective naturalisation laws are often used as a tool for population and immigration management. For both states which send and receive migrants, the recent toleration of dual citizenship is grounded in transnational migration but serves a statist logic. Multiple citizenship allows migrants to hold equal rights in the receiving country, whilst maintaining a legal status in their homeland. Therefore, multiple citizenship secures opportunities for transnational migrants with ties to multiple states. At the same time, countries that tolerate dual citizenship do so in order to create and maintain a strong legal tie with transnational migrants. In order to restore the congruence of membership and territorial boundaries, countries of the Global North have liberalised their naturalisation policies to facilitate the inclusion of immigrants in the past decades. Similarly, countries of emigration have also become tolerant of dual citizenship and allow their expatriates to keep and pass on homeland citizenship to their descendants, hoping that external citizens will send remittances, invest in their country of origin, and use their lobby power abroad to further the interests of their homeland governments.
In Citizenship 2.0. Dual Nationality as a Global Asset (2019), Yossi Harpaz explores these processes, focusing on how citizenship has become a strategic asset for individuals in a global world. Multiple citizenship allows individuals from less developed countries to seek membership in more developed countries in order to maximise personal utility. As a result, Harpaz argues that citizenship increasingly becomes ‘a piece of private property’. In his research, Harpaz goes beyond the mostly legal, institutional and quantitative analysis of citizenship regimes and trends. While the politics of citizenship has received ample scholarly attention in the past decade, there are only a few attempts to engage with macro-level analysis in order to map out how individuals use and consume citizenship.
Through three empirically rich qualitative case studies (Mexico, Serbia and Israel), Harpaz shows that ‘compensatory citizenship’ is not only used by individuals to migrate and settle down in more developed countries, but also for other utilitarian purposes. Wealthy Mexicans cross the border to make sure that their children are born in US territory, thus becoming US citizens, so that they can live, study, and work in the US later in their lives. Israelis of European descent (most of whom were persecuted during the Holocaust) acquire citizenship on the basis of Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian, Polish, and German ancestry, not only to get direct access to the European Union job market, but also as an insurance policy in case of an emergency in Israel. Much like Israeli Jews, many of those transborder Hungarians who live in non-EU states use their passports acquired from the introduction of non-resident citizenship, by the right-wing nationalist Orbán government, to get access to the EU job market.
While the pathways to citizenship may differ in the case of Mexican border crossers, Israelis with European ancestry, and Serbian citizens with Hungarian forbearers, in each case second citizenship is perceived as a ‘luxury product’ or status symbol. Harpaz's respondents perceive citizenship in purely instrumental terms. They see citizenship in the US or the EU as an investment and are therefore willing to invest money, time, and energy in obtaining it. Mexicans arrange travel to the US and give birth at costly private clinics, Serbian citizens with ancestors in the former Hungarian Kingdom learn Hungarian to apply for Hungarian citizenship, and Israelis pay large sums for lawyers and other experts to help them with the complicated naturalisation procedures in Central Europe. In some cases, prospective citizens are willing to take immense risks and even violate the law.
In summing up the experience of Israelis with European origins, Harpaz argues that the process of ‘acquiring European citizenship is an almost naked exchange of money for passports’. (2019, 125) Even if his sample includes only individuals who do not consider their ancestral national origins important to their identities, Harpaz convincingly argues that a second citizenship serves as a ‘strategy of global upward mobility’ (2019, 15). The main beneficiaries are individuals from middle-income states who are wealthy enough to obtain a second passport in a country that ranks far up in the global hierarchy, hoping that through the second ‘compensatory citizenship’ they can level out their lowly position in the global hierarchy. Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, Harpaz also shows that citizenship is a valuable instrumental asset for upwardly mobile citizens from middle-tier states, whilst individuals from the richest countries seek citizenship in less developed states for sentimental reasons.
One may disagree with Harpaz's view that traditional citizenship was institutionalised as a ‘sacred membership’ in a putatively culturally homogeneous national community, but it is hard to deny his main claim that citizenship is increasingly becoming an instrumental asset for individuals trying to improve their well-being. However, the shift towards a more instrumentalist understanding of citizenship may well be a matter of degree rather than a completely new approach to citizenship. In the absence of historic bottom-up studies on the meaning of citizenship for individuals, it is not easy to ascertain if sentimental reasons used to be more important in citizenship acquisition, as Harpaz suggests. The existing literature on national identification could equally allow for precisely the opposite assumption to be made. As the ground-breaking works of Pieter Judson (2007), Tara Zahra (2010), and Maarten Ginderachter and Jon Fox (2018) on the history of census data, national identification, and borderlands in multi-ethnic empires shows, throughout the nineteenth century individuals often ignored or even contested the nation-building projects of emerging states.
At the same time, it must also be noted that despite the recent instrumental turn, citizenship still has an important symbolic value for many individuals. In many cases, instrumentally valuable citizenship is also a marker of national identity. In Central and Eastern Europe, members of transborder minorities often consider citizenship in the kinstate as an important and official proof of belonging. For example, since the Hungarian government offered citizenship to non-resident descendants of Greater Hungary in 2010, more than one million individuals, mostly ethnic Hungarians living beyond Hungary's borders, have been naturalised. Sixty per cent of them live in Romania, another EU country, where Hungarian citizenship has little additional instrumental value, particularly for those tens of thousands of elderly Hungarians in Transylvania who do not want to work or travel abroad. Many of them did not even apply for the passport, as they needed Hungarian citizenship only as a tangible proof of their ethnic ancestry and national identity. Even those who applied for Hungarian citizenship often do not use it for travelling. Rather they display the passport on their living room walls along with family photos to remind themselves, as well as their guests, of their Hungarian belonging.
In the concluding chapter, Harpaz notes that the overwhelming demand for valuable passports has also impacted on citizenship policies. In the emerging global citizenship industry, states recognised the market potential and supply citizenship for wealthy individuals. Citizenship has become an asset not only for individuals but also for states. The strong demand for first world citizenship (and the active lobbying of private businesses involved in the citizenship industry) has incentivised governments to monetise citizenship as well as permanent residence.
In The Global Market for Investor Citizenship (2019), Jelena Džankić gives a detailed overview of investor citizenship and golden residency visa programmes designed for affluent individuals from the developing world. Whilst Harpaz's examples of inclusive citizenship regimes are mostly the unintended by-products of ius soli and ius sanguinis laws, Džankić engages with the literal merchandisation of membership. In these cases, citizenship is not only used by individuals for strategic instrumental purposes, but also defined and sold by states as a monetary asset.
Unlike Harpaz, who contrasts the recent instrumentalisation of citizenship with ‘traditional citizenship,’ Džankić shows that the commodification of citizenship has a long history. Citizenship in ancient Greece was the privileged status of wealthy male aristocrats alone and citizenship was even sold in the Roman Empire. Citizenship, understood as a status as well as a bundle of rights, has rarely been fully independent from status and property, even if citizenship has rarely been sold. As Džankić rightly points out, only after the Second World War has citizenship become ‘a marker of limits among communities as opposed to within them.’ (2019, 214)
While investment visa and golden residency programmes may have implications for the meaning of citizenship, the merchandisation of membership is itself the result of the historical transformation of citizenship as an institution. Džankić points out that many of the classical components of membership have been decoupled from formal citizenship. The traditional rights and obligations entailed in citizenship are now linked to residence. What Christian Joppke calls the ‘lightening of citizenship’ (Joppke, 2010) further facilitates the commodification of membership, particularly for less wealthy countries that are ranked high on passport indices. Most importantly, social rights are conditional on previous contribution. But even those social rights, that are still unconditionally available for every citizen, are unlikely to be a concern for those wealthy individuals and families that can afford to invest large amounts to buy citizenship in developed countries. Thus, states sell citizenship without offering any costly entitlements in return.
All this is best illustrated by the less developed European Union member states that sell national citizenship as a gateway to the richer EU countries. In the European Union, Eastern and Southern states risk little by selling passports and permanent residence, as most of their clients will use their EU citizenship to settle down in more prosperous Western and Northern European states. Thus, some states that offer national citizenship and residence permits actually provide access to the territories of other, more prosperous countries. As Džankić notes, Bulgarian, Cypriot and Maltese citizenship would hardly attract investors if it did not include access to the whole European Union. Interestingly, some EU member states that want to keep migrants and refugees out are also selling membership. For example, between 2012 and 2017, the Hungarian government offered residence to 20,000 individuals who purchased state bonds for 250–300 billion HUF each. The same nationalist government that erected a razor wire border fence to keep asylum seekers out and fervently rejected EU proposals that would have required the admission of a few hundred refugees, had no qualms about selling residence to Chinese millionaires and Russian oligarchs. The government argued that selling residency to rich investors cannot be compared to migration, as foreign investors buying residency in Hungary want to work in Western Europe and therefore will not migrate to Hungary.
These examples illustrate that citizenship secures privileges not only in the country of citizenship, but in other states as well. How states relate to individuals is determined by the passport that individual possesses. The same non-citizen may have very different entitlements in a country depending on their nationality. Amongst the European Union member states, second country nationals enjoy most of the same rights as citizens of the host country. Some third country nationals (mostly from first world countries) have visa-free access to the European Union as tourists, but have no access to citizenship entitlements. However, other third country nationals (mostly from less developed countries) cannot even travel to the European Union without a visa, which is in and of itself difficult to obtain.
It must however be noted that, the selling of citizenship as well as residency is more often the exception rather than the rule. The number of individuals who acquire citizenship, or even residency, through investment is very low when compared to other means of naturalisation. But even if we acknowledge that the merchandisation of citizenship is as much the cause as it is the consequence of the neoliberalisation of governance, the commodification of membership raises important broader questions about the meaning of citizenship. If citizenship is becoming a matter of passports and mobility, why should one revere it or even attach any special importance to it, asks Jo Shaw in The People in Question: Citizens and Institutions in Uncertain Times (2020). Without denying the implications of globalisation, Shaw reminds us that citizenship is the ‘fundamental building block’ of statehood, sovereignty, the international order, and even more. Shaw argues that citizenship ‘goes beyond the surface of legal norms and beyond the idea of citizenship as bundle of rights’. While the institution of citizenship is no longer the principal indicator of national membership and it may have few sentimental implications, it still defines a political community. Citizenship, understood broadly, is grounded in the specific and often implicit norms of particular cultural groups. It follows, contrary to the assumption that the value of citizenship is withering away in bureaucratic administrative states, that citizenship has become the cornerstone of nationhood. As Jürgen Habermas argues, formal citizenship policies that define membership, as well as the rights and duties of citizens, come to shape post-national constitutional identities and ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas, 2000).
In order to unpack what Habermas calls ‘constitutional citizenship,’ Shaw calls for going beyond the purely formal legal analysis of citizenship legislation. Shaw underscores that the study of legal status and formal membership rules needs to be complemented by a ‘sociologically embedded critical method’ to unearth the cultural foundations of citizenship. In this spirit, Shaw offers insightful analysis of the laws governing citizenship acquisition and loss, dual citizenship, and voting rights, whilst also engaging with the conversation between basic constitutional principles and citizenship. Amongst other things, Shaw investigates how constitutional definitions of equality and dignity translate into specific citizenship rights. To help the reader and bolster her arguments, Shaw intensively draws on case law as well as political discourse.
Concerning the future, all three books discuss the populist challenge to citizenship. Džankić and Harpaz conclude by suggesting that the current trends can easily be reversed, as rising national populist parties may try to reinstate the physical and symbolic boundaries of the nation-state through introducing more restrictive and exclusionary citizenship policies. If the institution of citizenship was resilient enough to withstand globalisation and regional integration, it is not likely to disappear in times of deglobalisation fuelled by the rise of anti-immigrant populist nationalist parties.
While Harpaz and Džankić discuss the populist backlash only briefly in their conclusions, Shaw devotes an entire chapter to the implications of populism for citizenship. Shaw convincingly argues that citizenship may well become a major field of contestation for populist parties that claim to represent the real people against foreigners and elites. In terms of citizenship, the more obvious dimension of populist contestation is inevitably the vertical exclusion of foreigners in the name of defending the interests of the real people, defined in national, ethnic or nativist terms. To put it bluntly, nationalist variations of populist parties embrace a nativist rhetoric whilst opposing liberal immigration and naturalisation policies. Most importantlypopulist parties want to use citizenship as a tool to exclude undesired foreigners and (re-)introduce ethnocultural or civilisational naturalisation criteria. But as Shaw explains, populists also present a horizontal challenge to liberal democratic citizenship. Anti-elitist populist parties regard intermediary institutions (such as checks and balances, independent courts, and even human rights) as elitist constructions that limit the people's sovereignty. Therefore, populism is a threat to liberal democratic constitutional citizenship grounded in formal rules and institutionalised arrangements. Shaw illustrates the populist challenge to citizenship through case studies of Canada, the US, the UK, Hungary, and India. Shaw uses these examples to show that populist majoritarianism, combined with nativism, challenges the democratic conception of equality which liberal democratic constitutional citizenship entails. Populist, anti-immigration, and nativist governments try to introduce more restrictive and selective naturalisation policies, even depriving individuals from undesired minorities of their formal citizenship.
However, Shaw is quick to note that ‘no citizenship regime is an island’ (2020, 230). Constitutional norms, including citizenship, are defended by national as well as international law, and therefore cannot be easily reformed. Tinkering with these norms may have undesirable political consequences for populist governments that are part of regional and supranational organisations. As the current disputes between Poland and Hungary with the European Union over rule of law criteria and immigration redistribution quotas show, populist nationalist governments cannot easily roll back basic liberal democratic norms even if they have an overwhelming majority in national parliaments and possess enough power to rewrite constitutions. Paradoxically, EU integration has on the one hand weakened the importance of national citizenship in member states, through the creation of a derivative common EU citizenship but on the other hand EU integration has also entrenched the norms of liberal constitutional citizenship in national legislation.
One can go even further and doubt the sincerity of populists’ demagogic attacks on liberal democratic values and liberal citizenship policies. Populists’ fervent and combatant rhetoric often serves the purpose of value signalling rather than preparing policy reforms. Whether they like it or not, populist governments have strong incentives to maintain existing liberal citizenship policy frameworks.
As I have mentioned above, investment citizenship is a lucrative business and its abolition would decrease state revenue, even for right-wing anti-immigration governments. The restriction of the over-inclusive ius sanguinis policies in Central Europe would exclude transborder ethnic kin populations and migrant diasporas from the national community, which would be contrary to the aims of nationalist populist parties that want to represent diasporas and expatriates. Similarly, the elimination of unconditional ius soli rules in the US could slow down immigration, which may have adverse economic implications. President-elect Biden's announcement to increase immigration and offer a citizenship path for 11 million undocumented residents in the US shows that temporary restrictions in immigration can easily be undone.
The commodification of citizenship is beneficial both for wealthy individuals and states. Džankić, Harpaz, and Shaw acknowledge that commercialised citizenship evens out some of the global inequalities between individuals, even if it may weaken national solidarity and incentivise corruption.
How less developed countries are impacted is a totally different question. If upwardly mobile citizens of middle and low income countries acquire citizenship in first world states, their financial assets and capabilities will not contribute to the improvement of their less developed homelands. The same opportunity that enables elites of less developed countries to catch up with the Global North, will leave the Global South even more impoverished.