Abstract
The global incidence of dual citizenship has dramatically increased as more states come to accept and even embrace the status. State policies related to dual citizenship have attracted growing scholarly attention, especially where the status is contested. Less closely studied, however, are individual conceptions of the status and motivations of those who acquire dual citizenship. Citizenship 2.0 aims to fill that gap with three fascinating case studies of why individuals are securing additional citizenships: Serbians that have become eligible for Hungarian naturalization, Mexicans who acquire US citizenship for their children by bearing them on US territory, and Israelis who are eligible for Central and East European nationalities on the basis of descent. This book is an important contribution to our understandings of dual nationality and citizenship more generally.
Harpaz works from the premise that not all citizenships are created equal; to the extent that some citizenships are more valuable than others, individuals will take advantage of new opportunity structures to avail themselves of a better nationality. Harpaz labels this phenomenon “compensatory citizenship,” in the sense of compensating for deficits in an individual’s existing citizenship (typically the citizenship of birth). Compensatory citizenship is nonresident and secondary. Incentives are contingent, although mobility privileges supply a common motivation. In the Serbian case, descendants of territorial residents of the border Vojvodina region — regardless of ethnicity — can acquire Hungarian citizenship upon demonstration of facility in Hungarian. With Hungarian citizenship comes European Union (EU) citizenship, and the ability to work and study anywhere in the EU. Well-to-do Mexican parents, mostly in the northern provinces on the US border, expend nontrivial resources to undertake “strategic cross-border birth” in the United States. US citizenship guarantees their children the rights to travel, study, and work in the United States — to fully avail themselves of the binational border society — as well as affording them a kind of insurance against political and social upheaval in Mexico. Israelis, finally, are increasingly taking advantage of eligibility for citizenship in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Rumania through descent from parents or grandparents who fled Europe in the dislocation and persecutions surrounding World War II. The appeal is travel privileges and settlement rights in Europe, but more so the possibility of visa-free travel to the United States.
On the basis of in-depth interviews (about 50 for each case study), Harpaz establishes the consumerist nature of these citizenship acquisitions. This is citizenship consumption, largely stripped of sentimental attachments; in these cases, citizenship and identity are “two separate domains” (54). Israelis have little affinity for the European states whose passports they are acquiring; they remain, as several subjects observed, “100 percent Israeli” (123). Unlike ethnic Hungarian residents of Vojvodina, those of Serbian descent do not identify with Hungary. In none of the three cases do citizenship beneficiaries (generally speaking) intend to move to the country whose citizenship they have acquired. In the Serbian and Mexican cases, the extra citizenship is not about status either. Serbian holders of Hungarian citizenship are concerned about perceptions of disloyalty. US citizenship is tarnished among upper-class Mexicans to the extent it is also associated with deportees from the United States; as one of Harpaz’s subjects observes, “anybody can get it” (92). For these Mexicans, European citizenship is the greater status symbol for its association with whiteness. European citizenship for Israelis does enhance status as a kind of formal certification of Ashkenazi ancestry, a group historically overrepresented among Israeli elites.
Citizenship 2.0 nicely highlights two additional elements of nonresident citizenship acquisition in these cases. First are the family dynamics. In the Mexican and Israeli examples, citizenship acquisition is considered an intergenerational “gift of love” (112). In the Mexican case, this gift is direct, since it is only the child, and not the parent, that gains the status. Israelis tend to secure the European nationality not for their own purposes but rather for their children’s. In Vojvodina, there is something of a reversal, with parents following young adults in securing Hungarian citizenship so they can visit children who use their new nationality to move to the EU. This pattern fits a consumerist frame, with citizenship as an inheritable asset. A consumerist thesis also runs through Harpaz’s description of the “citizenship industries” that have emerged to facilitate citizenship acquisition in these cases. In Vojvodina, language schools meet demand generated by those who lack the facility in Hungarian for naturalization. Boutique tourist agencies and Texas hospitals cater to Mexicans looking to deliver babies across the border. Specialist lawyers help Israelis navigate European citizenship regimes, expanding the market for these citizenships in the process.
Citizenship 2.0 broadens our understandings of “investment citizenship” beyond the more nakedly transactional examples in which citizenship is bought outright (now possible in Malta, Cyprus, several Caribbean states, and a growing number of other countries). At the same time that citizenship continues to connote sentimental elements in many contexts (including among Hungarian ethnics in Vojvodina, whom Harpaz largely brackets), the institution is clearly shedding the near-sacred associations of the modern period. Following Patrick Weil, Harpaz posits the phenomenon of “sovereign individuals” who share a “basic sense of freedom to strategize citizenship” (135). Of course, not everyone is sovereign for these purposes; citizenship is not always or even mostly for the choosing, and most of the world’s population is stuck with their inferior native nationalities. There are, however, an increasing number of contexts in which citizenship rules more or less arbitrarily enable some to expand their life opportunities. These new citizenship permutations warrant close scholarly attention. Citizenship 2.0 represents an essential entry in a growing literature reconsidering the place of citizenship today.