a few excerpts from my thesis that i had most fun writing

Dual Citizenship

Dual citizenship means that individuals have legal status as citizens in two sovereign states. It is a striking development because, while it had been regarded during most of the twentieth century as “an anomaly, at best, and an abomination, at worst” (Spiro 2010), it is now, and especially since the 1990s, inevitable – Harpaz and Mateos (2019) call it the post-exclusive turn in citizenship.

Therefore, it is remarkable that despite the attention that the topic of citizenship has received in academia in the past decades, the same was not true of dual citizenship. As Hansen and Weil put it, “[a]lthough intellectual curiosity and a professional need for publication tend to exhaust all aspects of whatever topic fires academic imagination, the massive interest in citizenship has not spilled over into a concern for dual nationality” (2002, 1) – scholars were barely grasping the phenomenon, and it already became multiple in nature.

Despite the changing academic landscape, with gradually more publications being devoted to the topic, academics often contemplate problems and possibilities of dual citizenship embedded in macro-political concerns that underlie much of the theoretical and normative debate: What does dual citizenship mean for the sovereignty of a state and the international system? Can genuine links between the state and individuals be maintained in this condition? (What are genuine links?) Does this status undermine basic democratic principles? Should dual citizenship be considered a human right?

• Although the so-called fundamental link connecting individual and state conferred by formal membership is not an exclusive one in cases of dual citizenship, this does not challenge the sovereignty of the nation-state per se. […] This is easily corroborated by the fact that granting citizenship remains under the discretion and control of the state. Similarly, the post-exclusive turn did not – and does not – presuppose any kind of ‘world parliament or global demos’ (Shachar et al. 2017, 6). What has changed is that the demographic boundary-maintenance regime no longer holds, that is, “[a] graphic representation of citizenship status would now be much more complex than a territorial map” (Spiro 2016, 140).

While formal citizenship is no longer needed for an individual to access a variety of civil and social rights (instead, legal residence is), it continues to be fundamental not only when it comes to political rights but also to another nuanced aspect of the place of the alien in a polity – even if a postnational citizen (see Soysal 1994): s/he resides in the host country only at the country’s discretion (see Bosniak, 2000). […] From these remarks, it is possible to derive two important points. First, one of the ambiguities of citizenship is that it implies exclusion as much as inclusion (Castles and Davidson 2000). Or in Cohen’s (1999) words, “[citizenship] always establishes privilege insofar as it endows members with particular rights denied to non-members”. And second, a fundamental property of formal membership is that it secures a place to live and offers protection against expulsion (Bloemraad 2017; Bauböck 2019). This right to unconditional residence is frequently mentioned by scholars, however, rather superficially. Lenard (2018) offers an expressive exception: according to this author, the very foundation of citizenship is the right to residential security (even before the right to vote and to hold a passport), to the extent that it “[underpins] the confidence [individuals] need to build their life in a place, with the expectation that they can continue to do so” (Lenard 2018).

Belonging

In short, feeling of belonging means feeling ‘at home’ (Antonsich 2010, 647; Yuval-Davis 2006, 197). It relates to an emotional, ‘or even ontological’ attachment to a place, which is both material and affective (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018). […] Thus, it does not seem implausible to suppose that the increased voluntarily global mobility also opens up opportunities for individuals to seek belonging or “to lead a life that is meaningful, a life worth living, which, according to hooks (2009, 1) is what to find a place where we belong is all about” (Antonsich 2010, 649).

• In this respect, such feeling of belonging does not exist in relation to a cosmopolitan ideal – as Hedetoft and Hjort put it, “belonging requires territorial and historical fixity [criteria in which] the globe does not qualify” (2002, xviii).

• Malkki (1992) offers an enlightening analysis of how the link between people and place is conventionally thought of in naturalising terms, especially botanical ones, and how this leads to a powerful sedentary conception of identity. According to the author, such a notion ‘actively territorializes our identities’ and ‘directly enables a vision of territorial displacement as pathological’: alternative conceptualisations are needed.

The phenomenon of dual citizenship is as novel as it is controversial because the possession of citizenship implies formal membership, which, as such, refers to a form of belonging to a nation-state. Hence, regardless of how dual citizenship was acquired, two states recognise the individual as rightfully part of their national community and her/his unconditional right to be there. This is by no means a trivial feature. Such belonging that stems from state recognition is tied in with the arsenal of an authoritative institution that ‘seeks to monopolise legitimate symbolic force’ by means of ‘naming, identifying, categorising, and stating what is what and who is who’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 15). […] Therefore, even though Skey (2013) emphasises that the ethnic—and rooted—majority draws benefits related to a dominant position in terms of ‘national cultural capital’, to assert that they are ‘positioned as one who belongs without question’ is not supported by formal membership; even when national borders have been crossed by the foreigner/immigrant, the lines of exclusion and ‘asymmetric power relations between those included and those outside’ cannot be sketched in terms of citizenship as legal status (see Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011, 200).

On the other hand, formal membership may not be enough for one to feel completely accepted: “the role of political institutions is not sufficient, if the rest of the society fails to ‘grant’ this recognition” (Antonsich 2010, 650). Hence, if and how the status arising from state recognition influences the negotiation that takes place on the ground, whether in terms feelings of belonging or self-identification, is an empirical question. […] Given that nationality is more than sporadically regarded as an identity label associated with a certain collectivity—category of practice—, whose boundaries are not conceived as easily traversable—if not only for questions of identity itself, then also based on the long prevailing discourse against dual citizenship—, it is certainly interesting to investigate empirically what it means to individuals to be assigned this official categorisation: Does it affect their self-understandings? (see Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 27).

Discussion

Global mobility and international immigration bring to citizenship – understood as formal membership, and as such, associated primarily with the political realm–a sociological implication that has not been duly incorporated into the academic debate. Within a macro and normative approach, which has been the centre of the literature on dual citizenship, debaters are essentially concerned with political issues; and these political concerns are transposed to the new scenario of increasing (and increasingly fluid) international movement of people, as if, once determined, they would suffice to resolve all that that matters. Strikingly, however, there is a scarcity of research on the micro perspective – and so the debate abounds with assumptions that may or may not make sense, or it tends to generalise findings without pondering the diverse nature of the phenomenon. Making sense of dual citizenship in the contemporary world requires the enthusiasm of scholars to study this topic as much as a reserve to recognise that it involves multiple circumstances – and more than that, it involves personal narratives entangled in a broader web of meaning-making. Revealingly, Spiro argues that dual citizenship ultimately undermines state-based identities (2016, 131). Even though he is an ardent defender of the tolerance of the status, unlike Franck (1996), he does not conceive of multiple horizontal belongings. Hence, for him, “plural citizenship will almost always involve one citizenship that is dearer than the other” (Spiro 2010, 128). What does dearer mean, though? And to which dual citizens?

If dual citizenship is only measured in political terms – or to fit a closed understanding of it –, then the ‘use’ of each one becomes invariably ‘asymmetrical’ and potentially mutually exclusive. However, people assign meanings to this status on different grounds than those that the literature has traditionally considered (and been willing to fathom). Moving beyond the notion that it is just an instrumental asset, empirical studies have uncovered new dimensions in the way dual citizenship is interpreted within long-distance naturalisations: Knott (2019) found that people may understand it to simply be their right, and Leuchter (2014) that, regardless of the motivation to pursue a second citizenship, the status became a tool that strengthens one’s attachment to their country of origin. What about dual citizens who are also immigrants? Are they bound to be legal aliens enjoying a bureaucratic convenience (think of Sting’s Englishman in NY)? Yanasmayan’s (2015) brilliant study transcended the conventional construct that allowing immigrants to keep their original citizenship leads to higher rates of naturalisation (and, eventually, to better social and economics outcomes). It revealed deeper levels of understanding of the impact of dual citizenship on lived experiences: the toleration of the status allowed Turkish immigrants to retain an emotional link with it more generally, paving the way for new experiences of belonging. My findings point to the same direction: dual citizenship is not about transferring or dividing loyalties as it is about extending possibilities of belonging–for if dual citizenship is instrumentally used to immigrate or remain in the host state, it is the very pillar of one’s feeling of belonging (even if this belonging is perceived differently among people). In this respect, the literature on belonging can play an essential role in illuminating the wh-questions of the significance of dual citizenship in the context of immigration, as it provides mechanisms to understand how the status is linked to life experiences in subtle, unexplored ways.

As most of the individuals I interviewed have acquired dual citizenship on the basis of ancestry, I take this ‘clue’ within the literature to discuss my findings:

“Dual citizenship offered for third-country citizens by various EU member states raises another novel dilemma. […] As critics note, these states ‘open back doors’ to the EU by generously handing out citizenship to many third-country nationals, who may move and work in any of the EU member states.” (Pogonyi 2011, 699)

This form of naturalisation is commonly understood as an external citizenship, whose significance is exhausted in being a ‘portable good’ within a stratified global society (Harpaz 2015, 2019; Harpaz and Mateos 2019). However, if immigration takes place, then Pogonyi’s remark is accurate: as my research has shown, these ‘back doors to the EU’ did open the door to the homes of the people I interviewed.

Regardless of whether Franck’s (1996) thesis about the reason behind the growing tolerance of dual citizenship was correct or not, the experiences of the participants in my study are in consonance with his understanding that people can develop multiple national affiliations and possibly ‘identities’ – and that such multiple belonging may become an essential part of one’s personal narrative. The people I interviewed have chosen to immigrate and make their host societies their home – those under home in progress, at least for now – and many display aspects of self-identification that reflects an active personal pursuit – even if as ‘Europeans’. This path is one that admittedly encounters ambivalences and confrontations. And in this scenario, what becomes salient is the role that citizenship plays, in that it formally grants their right to stay, permanently, where they are; they do not have to recurrently answer the question “why are you here?” to secure temporary permission with the administrative authorities. In short, they are entitled to the place.

The participants were much aware of citizenship as a project of the politics of belonging, for it is this property that gives them confidence to “build their lives [and homes] there, with the expectation that they can continue to do so” (Lenard 2018). In this sense, with the official status, they know that they also ‘belong without question’ (Skey 2013); citizenship is absolute. For them, formal membership is not ‘just another bureaucratic hurdle to make life a little bit easier’, like those who respond to ‘the call for the Super Citizen’ with disaffection in Badenhoop’s study (2021, 575). This points to a specificity of the sample in this study: they are a young and mobile generation for whom immigration is/becomes an option, not a necessity. It is in this context that a EU passport stands out, as it also allows individuals to settle in different countries within the Union (it would be interesting to compare this with how native Europeans of similar age and educational background make sense of and use their European passport – Blanchard’s (2020) research, for instance, shows that young Italians born in Italy are engaged in a similar intra-EU mobility as the Argentinian and Chilean dual citizens she studied).

Moreover, the respondents did not lead transnational lives as they tended to limit their understanding of home to where they current reside. In general, being in Brazil corresponds to familiarity, but also to nostalgia or a ‘live museum’ of their own lives. Thus, these individuals are not ‘longing-to-be’ in Brazil, nor have they joined a community of Brazilians in their host societies in the quest to keep ‘home’ close (see Hedetoft and Hjort 2002, vii). This leads to the next point. […] my findings also show that one does not need to identify with the national collectivity – and be seen as one – to feel at home and feel like staying – after all, they are formally entitled to do so. That being said, self-identification, even if as a process with a situational character (or precisely as one), does seem to be an important element for those in found home – a process of becoming negotiated in the everyday life amid symbolic boundaries from the native-national community – in the question of ‘who can and cannot be part of the group’, symbolically speaking – and boundaries from within – the limits that individuals find in their own repertoire.

Apart from some individual studies, the limited intellectual creativity within academia concerning dual citizenship clashes with T.H. Marshall’s own motivation to advance his study on citizenship and the very contribution he is known for in the field. (I would not be surprised if Marshall himself, these days, would be interested in the topic specifically through the lens of the global movement of people.) As the boundaries of the demographic regime become porous and no longer match that of geographical frontiers – not that it ever has, but unquestionably less than ever –, individuals pursue and create new experiences, belongings, and narratives. In this context, the expansion of dual citizenship is not ‘a major challenge to the traditional nation-state model’ as it is to academia itself (see Castles and Davidson 2000, 88). Today, most nation-states accept the status and, as Bauböck (2019) noted, for individuals, there is nothing strange or wrong with this.