Comparative report : citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe

This report analyses contemporary citizenship laws of 17 countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), including 11 new EU member states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) and 6 post-Soviet states (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine).Research for the 2016/2017 GLOBALCIT Reports has been supported by the European University Institute's Global Governance Programme, the EUI Research Council, and the British Academy Research Project CITMODES (co-directed by the EUI and the University of Edinburgh)

Don’t Put the Baby in the Dirty Bathwater! A Rejoinder

It is beyond dispute that any attempt to dislodge a deeply rooted and widespread institution such as ius sanguinis is bound to pose serious practical challenges. However, if one has compelling moral reasons for dismantling such an institution, one ought to work towards this end. Babies are born into a physical world and from actual bodies but they are not naturally born into families and citizenship. The latter are social conventions that demand our acceptance when they are justified and our courage to change and replace them when they are not. To my critics who worried that abolishing ius sanguinis amounts to throwing out the baby with the dirty bathwater I reply that we should not put the baby in the dirty bathwater in the first place

The governance of citizenship and belonging in Europe and the European Union

The chapter discusses key citizenship developments in Europe from the perspective of the enduring tensions between lightening and thickening and between denationalisation and renationalisation. It focuses on five major issues that challenge the ideal type of modern citizenship 146as territorial, political and national membership, namely, international migration, cross border ethnic minorities, home-grown terrorism, marketization of citizenship and supranational citizenship. Despite talks about the inevitable demise of citizenship, citizenship remains a privileged tool for tackling challenges as various as integrating immigrants, reuniting the nation beyond borders, putting off terrorists or navigating the waters of financial crisis. This rebirth of citizenship comes with both opportunities and risks. On the one hand, reaffirming and debating citizenship could help building more legitimate institutions and more inclusive narratives of belonging. On the other hand, with nationalism rising in Europe and elsewhere, there is a clear danger of the renationalization of citizenship that will revert some of the liberal achievements with regard to immigrants’ easier access to citizenship, greater acceptance of dual citizenship, and stronger guarantees against citizenship deprivation

Nationality, citizenship and ethno-cultural membership : preferential admission policies of EU countries

Defence date: 13 December 2012Examining Board: Professor Rainer Bauböck (European University Institute); Professor Ruth Rubio Marín (European University Institute); Professor Joseph Carens (University of Toronto); Professor David Owen (University of Southampton).In this thesis, I analyse justifications for preferential admission to citizenship based upon ethno-cultural grounds. My point of departure is the puzzling observation that, in matters of membership, states not only differentiate between citizens and foreigners, but also between different categories of foreigners, as well as between different categories of citizens. In the first part of this work, I explore possible justifications for boundaries of membership. I look into arguments of justice, nationalism, liberalism and democracy in order to identify principles for demarcating boundaries and for assessing various claims of inclusion/exclusion. In the second part, I address more specific questions related to the regulation of admission to citizenship. For this purpose, I examine a set of concrete rules of citizenship presently enforced by 27 EU countries. My proposal is to overcome the boundary problem by shifting the focus from the constitution of the boundary towards policies of boundary making. I affirm the principle of general openness of membership that is intended to provide normative corrections to the actual structure of boundaries. Against the common view that perceives citizenship as a fruit that is soft on the inside and hard on the outside, I argue that citizenship should be seen as soft on the inside and even softer on the outside. In order to respond to different claims of admission, I suggest breaking up the unitary concept of citizenship and distinguishing between legal, political, and identity memberships. This proposal is not meant to weaken or devaluate citizenship, but to reaffirm its essentially political value. By rejecting ideas of automatic and inherited citizenship and by insisting upon democratic recognition and commitment to political membership, I aim at recasting admission to citizenship as a transformative process through which individuals not merely receive membership but become members in a political community

Introduction: Citizenship in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Citizenship has been rediscovered in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist regimes and the breakdown of multi-national states. This rediscovery revealed not only great opportunities with regard to democratic inclusion, national redefinition and the remedying of past wrongs but also important risks, such as legal and political exclusion, ethnic engineering and discrimination. The broader revival of citizenship in recent decades has triggered a renewed academic interest in issues of citizenship, albeit this research had remained biased towards Western experiences, such as long-term immigration and social integration. Although it would be ill-advised to talk of Eastern European models of citizenship, the region does present a number of empirical and theoretical puzzles that can enrich the existing literature by challenging conventional approaches and stimulating more-balanced and contextual theoretical perspectives

Anticipatory minority rights for majorities turning into minorities

Concerns about national, cultural and demographic preservation have become increasingly salient in the age of migrations and globalisation. Liav Orgad fittingly points to recent political reactions to the influx of refugees in Europe and to broader trends towards relinking citizenship and migration policies with concerns about national identity and cultural integration. He is right to complain about the reluctance among political theorists to engage systematically with these developments. I fully agree with Orgad that ignoring these issues is both “theoretically wrong” and “politically unwise”. However, I disagree that majorities have special majority rights that can be defended on the same normative basis as minority rights. I argue that if a current majority group is worried about its rights, it should genuinely support minority rights in anticipation of its future minority status.</p