Dual Citizenship And Dual Nationality Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Dual citizenship describes the status of individuals holding citizenship status in more than one country. The status suffered severe historical disfavor. In recent years, however, dual citizenship has become increasingly common. A majority of countries now accepts the legitimacy of dual citizenship.

Dual citizenship results from the interplay of national rules relating to the acquisition of citizenship. Individuals can be born with dual citizenship where their parents hold different nationalities or where they are born in a country other than that of parental nationality. Many countries now allow individuals to retain citizenship after acquiring the citizenship of another country through naturalization. A nontrivial number of individuals hold citizenship in more than two countries, giving rise to a phenomenon more accurately described as plural citizenship.

Recent acceptance contrasts with difficulties historically provoked by the status. During the nineteenth century, European states refused to recognize the naturalization of their subjects in the United States. This resulted in competing claims over immigrants and serious bilateral controversies, including the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. Immigrants to the United States who visited their homelands often faced harassment by governments seeking to extract military service notwithstanding permanent relocation.

Because of the frictions triggered by dual nationals, states attempted to suppress the status. States were never able to eliminate dual nationality, because they were unwilling to harmonize nationality laws. However, they did adopt mechanisms to reduce the incidence of dual nationality. Many countries required individuals born with dual nationality to choose one or the other at age of majority (a so-called election requirement). By the end of the nineteenth century, most European states were terminating original nationality upon naturalization elsewhere. For instance, after 1870, British subjects who acquired citizenship in the United States lost their British nationality as a result of U.S. naturalization. Because dual nationality often resulted in duplicative national obligations (especially regarding military service), individuals also shared an interest in avoiding the status.

Dual nationality remained the object of scorn through much of the twentieth century. The status was often compared to bigamy. The mid-nineteenth-century American diplomat George Bancroft observed that states should “as soon tolerate a man with two wives as a man with two countries; as soon bear with polygamy as that state of double allegiance which common sense so repudiates that it has not even coined a word to express it. ”Teddy Roosevelt called dual nationality “a self-evident absurdity.” Public perception of the status assumed the undesirability of divided allegiance and diminished loyalty. Although there were no notable cases of dual-national saboteurs, dual nationality conjured up the specter of shadowy fifth columns.

These associations were slow to dissipate. Massive migrations at the end of the twentieth century once again set up the possibility for a greater incidence of dual citizenship. In contrast to earlier periods, however, dual citizens no longer posed a particular threat to interstate relations. States grew more tolerant of the status, and transformed conceptions of national solidarities diluted the former identification of the status with disloyalty. This diminished the incentive for eligible individuals to avoid the status. As states grew less demanding in terms of obligations extracted from citizens, moreover, individuals could reap concrete and sentimental benefits from maintaining formal ties with more than one country.

Indeed, some states have moved beyond mere toleration of dual citizenship to full embrace. It is increasingly viewed as a tool for cementing diaspora populations. This is true among such established historical diasporas as the Irish and Italians, the homelands of which have loosened citizenship rules to allow for the nationality of third-generation emigrants. Many Americans have on that basis reclaimed the citizenship of their grandparents, reaping the travel, educational, and employment benefits that come with citizenship in European Union member states. Those who returned to Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the iron curtain typically retained citizenship in their adopted homelands, in many cases while assuming leadership positions in newly democratized states. Such immigrant-sending states as Mexico, Turkey, and the Philippines have also moved to encourage the status as they look to draw on the economic prosperity of emigrant communities and to mobilize them politically in their new states of residence.

Some important countries continue to buck the trend toward acceptance of dual citizenship, especially East Asian and African states. But there are now many millions of individuals who openly hold nationality in more than one country. Plural citizenship appears almost certain to emerge an irreversible incident of globalization.

Bibliography:

Boll, Alfred M. Multiple Nationality and International Law. Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007.
Faist,Thomas, and Peter Kivisto, eds. Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective: From Unitary to Multiple Citizenship. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Hansen, Randall, and Patrick Weil, eds. Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the United States and Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002.
Martin, David A., and Kay Hailbronner, eds. Rights and Duties of Dual Nationals. The Hague: Kluwer, 2003.
Renshon, Stanley A. The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Spiro, Peter J. Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.