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How ethnic are citizenship policies in EU countries? Conference paper outline 15/12/2009
The rules concerning the acquisition of national citizenship in European Union are (still) fairly divergent. However, these citizenship regimes bear some particularly striking similarities. Some states allow for the (re-)acquisition of citizenship based on “special ties” considerations (e.g. past or actual legal connection, cultural or ethnic affinity). An increasing number of countries abandon the reluctance towards dual citizenship and/or adopt measures to preserve, extend or enable citizenship for non-resident populations (emigrants). Do these developments account for “re-ethnicization” of citizenship in Europe? Accounts on (re-/de-)ethnicization of citizenship in Europe have been mainly concerned with the problematique of immigration (entry selection, naturalization) in Western Europe, and with the problematique of nation-building (state, minority and external kin nationalism, ethnic diaspora) in Eastern Europe. The proposed paper tries to bridge the two contexts in order to trace down specific elements that allure to ethnicity in citizenship policies Europe-wide. The aim of the paper is, therefore, twofold: (1) theoretical- it identifies and discusses several features of citizenship regulation that could be taken as “ethnic”; (2) empirical- it surveys the citizenship rules of the 27 EU countries in search for the proposed “ethnic” features. The paper identifies specific strategies through which states construct and reinforce ethnicity. Avoiding the debate over the meaning of ethnicity, the paper takes ethnicity simply as reference to common origin and descent. The underlying normative premise is that the boundaries of political membership (citizenship) must draw as little as possible on ascriptive features. As the analysis reveals, not all problematic/non-liberal elements in citizenship policies are ethnically-driven; descent-based preferentialism embodies just another type of unfairness that can parasitize 2 political membership (I shall call it ethnically-clothed unfairness). There is no need to argue that (certain) state policies are grounded in comprehensive philosophies of ethnic nationhood in order to divulge the unfair consequences of utilizing ethnically-charged criteria of political membership. Six elements are picked up as candidates for conveying ethnic markers of membership policies: (a) ius sanguinis; (b) automatic or facilitated (re)acquisition of citizenship for “relatives” (political, cultural, ethnic); (c) ethno-cultural requirements for naturalization (integration tests); (d) reluctance towards plural citizenship (renunciation requirement); (e) differential treatment in the acquisition/loss of citizenship (between former/natural and former/naturalized citizens); (f) procedural bias (discretion, lack of rule-based processes). It is argued that although any of the six elements can take on ethnic undertones they are not ethnic by default. For example, ius sanguinis rule has been historically employed for non-ethnic purposes (non-feudal political membership) but it becomes ethnically charged when applied without limitations to descendents of citizens abroad. The paper maps the citizenship regimes of the 27 EU countries focusing on the six ethnically-charged elements. In the first stage, it builds a chart accounting for the presence or absence of the proposed elements. In the second stage, it analyses cases (grouped in clusters rather than individually) against their contexts to test whether they are ethnically driven or not. The findings challenge the thesis about the “de-ethnicization” of citizenship in Europe, unveiling that (strategic) ethnicity is still present in the regulation of citizenship in ways which go beyond simplistic cleavages like east/west or immigrant v. ethnic diaspora. In doing so, the work builds on data from: previous personal research (citizenship regulations in Eastern Europe); country reports from NATAC, EUCITAC frameworks (“old” and “new” Europe), additional data from the platform offered by EUDO CITIZENSHIP observatory, early syntheses (e.g. by Baubock, Waldrauch, Sievers) and more “processed” data from related comparative studies (e.g. by Joppke, Howard, Liebich).
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