Attachment Issues: Assessing the Relationship Between Newcomers and the Constitution

Are you attached to the principles of the U.S. Constitution? How do you prove it—do you feel it, or just know it? What role does it play in your daily life as a citizen? Ever since one of the first acts of the U.S. Congress, the Naturalization Act of 1795, applicants for citizenship have been required to demonstrate that they are “attached to the principles of the [C]onstitution of the United States.” This requirement has been at the forefront of fierce debates in U.S. constitutional history and, although it has had limited usage after WWII, it has recently been brought up again. In 2021, President Biden announced a new bill (Citizenship Act 2021) which if passed by Congress would facilitate the pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented migrants that would need to show attachment as part of their naturalization requirements. Attachment requirements have also mushroomed in other liberal democracies, which have had the U.S. model in mind when designing their naturalization procedures. This Article is the first to present a systematic updated legal analysis of the attachment requirement in U.S. constitutional law and citizenship policy from a comparative perspective. The Article tracks the historical roots of the attachment requirement since the American colonies to date, demonstrates the controversies and disputes over its essence, and assesses its underlying theory, purpose, content, and methods. Overall, the Article provides normative insights, comparative lessons, and historical contexts to one of the most fundamental questions of the political community—who belongs, under what conditions, and why

Wie Corona das gesellschaftliche Miteinander verändern kann

In der Corona-Pandemie verzichten die Menschen auf das Händeschütteln. Könnte der medizinisch empfohlene Verzicht in Europa auch einen kulturellen Wandel einläuten

Ties that bind and unbind : charting the boundaries of European Union citizenship

Published online: 05 August 2022Acquiring or losing European Union (EU) citizenship is contingent on the possession of citizenship of one of the Member States. Since the early 1990s, scholars have debated the unique character of EU citizenship. Remarkably, these debates have paid scarcely any attention to how EU citizenship is (un)recognised through the different conceptions of membership in the 27 countries that make up its boundaries. This article argues that understanding the substance of EU citizenship requires a look into the different domains of citizenship laws in each of the Member States. We present a novel conceptual framework for studying citizenship regimes through four types of citizen-state links: lineage, territory, sponsorship and merit. We find that the disparity among the Member States in who is (un)seen as an EU citizen results from the different ways in which the four types of state-citizen links are articulated in the rules for citizenship acquisition and loss

Going global : opportunities and challenges for the development of a comparative research agenda on citizenship policies at the global level

Thanks to the work undertaken by different research teams (GLOBALCIT, MACIMIDE, MIPEX…), data on citizenship policies are becoming available on a wide range of countries worldwide. The collection of these data makes it possible to develop new comparative research frameworks that go beyond the dominant European/Western-centred perspective that we find in traditional citizenship studies. The development of cross-regional comparative frameworks allows testing the generalisability of explanations for policy-variations more comprehensively and contributes to formulating new hypotheses and theories to account for both convergences and divergences across time and space. However, the need to adapt concepts and measurement tools to the different realities of citizenship at the global level raises important challenges. Drawing on the workshop ‘Going Global: Opportunities and Challenges for the Development of a Comparative Research Agenda on Naturalisation Policies at the Global Level’ that was convened in 2021 at the Robert Schuman Centre, under the framework of the Global Citizenship Governance programme, contributors to this working paper have been invited to reflect on the promises and difficulties that the articulation of a global comparative perspective in citizenship studies involves. Two main recommendations for the advancement of a comparative agenda at the global level stand out from this symposium: the first is to accommodate as much as possible the specificities of each context within the construction of comparative frameworks; the second is to acknowledge the biases and limitations of the perspective that we take as researchers. It therefore emerges that in order to make a distinct contribution to scholarly knowledge by expanding the geographical scope of their investigations, citizenship scholars need to address the challenge of comparability.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 716350)

Attachment Issues: Assessing the Relationship Between Newcomers and the Constitution

Are you attached to the principles of the U.S. Constitution? How do you prove it—do you feel it, or just know it? What role does it play in your daily life as a citizen? Ever since one of the first acts of the U.S. Congress, the Naturalization Act of 1795, applicants for citizenship have been required to demonstrate that they are “attached to the principles of the [C]onstitution of the United States.” This requirement has been at the forefront of fierce debates in U.S. constitutional history and, although it has had limited usage after WWII, it has recently been brought up again. In 2021, President Biden announced a new bill (Citizenship Act 2021) which if passed by Congress would facilitate the pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented migrants that would need to show attachment as part of their naturalization requirements. Attachment requirements have also mushroomed in other liberal democracies, which have had the U.S. model in mind when designing their naturalization procedures. This Article is the first to present a systematic updated legal analysis of the attachment requirement in U.S. constitutional law and citizenship policy from a comparative perspective. The Article tracks the historical roots of the attachment requirement since the American colonies to date, demonstrates the controversies and disputes over its essence, and assesses its underlying theory, purpose, content, and methods. Overall, the Article provides normative insights, comparative lessons, and historical contexts to one of the most fundamental questions of the political community—who belongs, under what conditions, and why