David Owen (University of Southampton and Institute for Advanced Study Princeton)

Rainer Bauböck (Austrian Academy of Sciences and European University Institute)

On 19 September 2019 the Austrian Parliament adopted unanimously an amendment to Austria’s citizenship law. It offered direct descendants of the victims of Nazi persecution Austrian citizenship, without the harsh naturalisation requirements that Austria imposes on immigrants. Beneficiaries can become Austrian without taking up residence, renouncing their previous citizenships, or passing the income, language, civic knowledge and criminal record tests. The new law corrected a blatant flaw in the previously existing regulation that offered restoration of Austrian citizenship to surviving victims of the Nazi regime but not to their descendants. Even that offer was under the condition that the former had not voluntarily acquired another citizenship. Since most could not retrieve their Austrian citizenship under this law, their children also did not become citizens under Austria’s ius sanguinis rule, which transmits citizenship for births abroad without limit across generations, but is in fact interrupted when parents decide to naturalise in their new host state and automatically lose their Austrian citizenship. Only in 2001 did Austria’s Constitutional Court state the obvious: the victims of Nazi terror did not voluntarily renounce their Austrian citizenship but were forced to adopt a new membership in order to avoid becoming stateless or being considered enemy aliens as citizens of the Third Reich.  

The revision of the Austrian law was a remarkable success. Even the far right FPÖ, whose party history and current rhetoric is tainted by Nazi affinities, voted in favour. And the uptake of the offer by the children and grandchildren of those who had fled Austria between 1938 and 1945 has been phenomenal. In 2020, 2021 and 2023, the previously small numbers of extraterritorial acquisitions of Austrian citizenship accumulated to 24,200, which is 43% of all citizenship acquisitions in that period. Numbers of potential beneficiaries are still far higher and estimated at half a million, or more than 5% of the current population.

Three reasons for citizenship restoration: Exile, lost territory, gender discrimination

Austria is not the only case of citizenship offered as reparations to Holocaust victims. A Greek law of 2011 that automatically restored citizenship for Jews born before 1945 was similarly extended to their descendants in a 2017 amendment.  In Germany, restoration of citizenship for Nazi victims had been conditional upon taking up residence in the country until 2020, when a new Wiedergutmachungseinbürgerung (reparative naturalisation) was adopted that includes descendants living permanently abroad. The German provision extends to ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe who lost their citizenship after World War Two due to collective naturalisation policies affecting those who had not been expelled. Spain adopted a historic memory law in 2007 and a ‘democratic memory law’ in 2022 that have allowed restoration of citizenship for those exiled during the Franco dictatorship and their children during three-year periods,  with an estimated 700,000 potential beneficiaries.

In a few cases, such reparative citizenship laws reach back much farther in time. Portugal and Spain adopted laws in 2013 and 2015, respectively, that offer citizenship to Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula towards the end of the 15th century. None of the Spanish reparative laws were open-ended. They always came with a limited application period, and Sephardic Jews had to come to Spain to apply and prove some basic knowledge of Spanish. Portugal decided to restrict the law in another way. Since 2024, applicants must not only prove Portuguese Sephardic ancestry and current links to a Sephardic community, but also residence in Portugal for at least three years during their lives.

If groups driven into exile can reclaim citizenship after many generations, how about others who have lost their original citizenship due to shifting international borders? After World War Two, Poland’s territory moved westward. Poland has ample provisions for restoring citizenship to those who lost it involuntarily, including WWII refugees, displaced persons in Soviet occupied territories, and dissidents deprived of their citizenship during the Communist period. This includes again descendants.  Poland does not, however, offer citizenship to those who had to renounce it in order to acquire a new nationality. In 2007, to make up for the resulting loss of population affiliated to the Polish nation abroad, the country introduced a form of quasi-citizenship, the Karta Polaka (Polish card), which was initially only available to citizens of Polish origin in previously Soviet Republics. In 2019, eligibility for the card was extended to citizens of all states. To obtain the Karta Polaka, one must prove at least one grandparent who had Polish citizenship or get an attestation of active involvement in Polish cultural life by a diaspora organisation.

The case of Romania is even more interesting. From 1918 to 1940, most of the territory of what is today Moldova was part of Romania. In 1940, it was annexed by the Soviet Union and became an independent country in 1991. Under Romanian law, Moldovan citizens can acquire Romanian citizenship if they speak Romanian and prove that they or their ancestors resided in Romania before 1948. Because Moldova’s official language is Romanian and it was in the past a part of Romania, these conditions can be easily fulfilled by a large majority of Moldovan citizens. And indeed, very large numbers of these have acquired Romanian passports, with the significant benefit of getting EU citizenship and free movement rights. Although Moldova obtained its status as a candidate for EU accession only in 2022, large parts of its population are already EU citizens, as a result of Romania’s citizenship policy.

Other cases of citizenship restoration in lost territories again stretch back into a more distant past. Hungary offers naturalisation entitlements to persons with ancestry rooted in former Hungarian territories before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, provided that they pass a Hungarian language test. Since Serbia is not in the EU and allows for dual citizenship, this Hungarian offer has produced a flourishing industry of Hungarian language instruction in the former Hungarian and now Serbian region of Vojvodina.

Let us finally mention the case of Ireland. In 1922, when gaining independence from Britain at the end of a civil war, the island was partitioned into the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. A period of violent conflict over equal rights for Catholics in the North and reunification with the South, euphemistically known as “the troubles”, started in the late 1960s and ended in 1998 with the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement. This settlement created complex layers of joint government across the sectarian divide within Northern Ireland, across the North-South border, and across the British Isles. An important part of this agreement was “birthright protection”, a commitment by the British and Irish governments to allow the people of Northern Ireland to identify and be accepted as Irish, British, or both, and entrenching their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship. In Northern Ireland, as in Moldova, people can opt into citizenship of the neighbouring country – and, after Brexit, regain EU citizenship – based on a common historical past and ongoing aspirations for future unification. The difference is that in the Irish case, writing the existing practice of the Irish citizenship offer in the North into an international treaty was intended to facilitate reconciliation after a civil war (as were the Spanish laws to restitute citizenship to exiles after the civil war).

A third significant type of reparative citizenship policies concerns cases where reparation claims do not refer to past oppressive governments or loss of territory, but to injustice in the past operation of the state’s nationality law whereby members of some groups (and thereby their descendants) were denied a nationality to which they would otherwise have been entitled or had their nationality stripped from them. A good example is that of women who were unable to transmit their citizenship to children under paternal ius sanguinis laws or who were stripped of their nationality after marriage to a foreign citizen. While a 1934 law put an end to gender discrimination in U.S. citizenship transmission to children born abroad, the law applied then only prospectively. Only in 1994 was citizenship granted retroactively to anyone born before 1934 to a foreign father and U.S. mother outside U.S. territory. Germany and France grant a conditional right to citizenship to children who were denied citizenship at birth on the basis of gender discrimination affecting their mothers. In the case of Germany this extends to grandchildren, subject to passing language and civic tests.

Alongside these three main types of reparative citizenship, a recent development in Benin offers a further and distinctive case with a new law offering citizenship to descendants of slaves who were deported from sub-Saharan Africa who are over the age of 18 and don’t possess another African nationality. This law acknowledges the central role that the port of Ouidah played in the slave trade and the estimated 1.5 million slaves that were deported through the Bight of Benin (an area that covers Benin, Togo and part of Nigeria in today’s terms). Notably there is no suggestion here that those deported as slaves had any civic status in or connection to Benin, rather the idea is that citizenship can serve as reparations for the complicity of the ancestors of the people of Benin in what David Scott calls the ‘irreparable evil’ of the slave trade.

When is a citizenship offer reparative?

There are more cases that we hope will be highlighted in this forum debate. Our aim is, however, not just to draw attention to an often-overlooked phenomenon of extraterritorial expansion of citizenship justified as reparation. We want to explore instead the motives of states making such offers and of individuals who take them up, the impact of this practice on international relations and domestic politics, and the normative question: What, if anything, can be problematic about offering citizenship as reparations for historic injustice? And which injustices should be recognised in this way?

Let us start with a preliminary definition that aims to delimit the phenomenon and cases we want to consider: Citizenship as reparations involves the offer of citizenship status acquired by declaration or entitlement for persons who live permanently outside the state’s territory and are the descendants of persons who have lost their citizenship or similar membership status and could not pass it on to a next generation under conditions for which the current state bears responsibility and for which it accepts remedial duties. These include state perpetrated mass killings, persecutions or expulsions, a loss of parts of the state’s territory through secession, partition or annexation by another state, and discriminatory past citizenship laws that deprived certain groups of their citizenship status who would be entitled to this status under current legislation.

This definition emphasises, first, symmetry between the wrong of lost citizenship and the remedy of restoring citizenship status. It thus does not cover cases where other kinds of compensations (money or rights such as immigration privileges) are offered for past citizenship deprivation. The Karta Polaka illustrates a compensation approach that provides an alternative status and bundle of rights. Such compensations normally benefit only one generation whereas citizenship can be passed on to descendants. We are interested in policies that create new citizens under a justification of reparations. This is why we do not analyse other kinds of compensations, although we will advocate them in our conclusions for a wide set of cases of historic injustice. The definition also rules out policies where citizenship is awarded as reparations for a wrong that did not consist in membership deprivation by the state making the offer. Benin’s citizenship for descendants of slave trade victims illustrates this possibility although we will include it in our discussion as an intriguing contrast case.

Second, we do not consider the mere restoration of citizenship through re-acquisition by former citizens (including first generation victims of state-perpetrated atrocities). We are instead interested in the more expansive forms of reparations that create new citizens after a chain of transmissions has already been broken. Our interest is in historic injustices that have lasting effects beyond a single generation and a mere re-acquisition rule does not address these.

Third, we consider as problematic highly discretionary and demanding naturalisations, although some of the reparative citizenship laws move in this direction. For example, the Spanish citizenship grants for Sephardic Jews are technically discretionary whereas the memory law offers citizenship restitution as an unconditional right. Imposing difficult access conditions unrelated to historic injustice may defeat the purpose of reparations. It would be incoherent to claim to be offering reparations while in fact selecting beneficiaries who meet a country’s human capital needs or integration requirements.

Fourth our definition does not cover privileged citizenship acquisition (by declaration or facilitated naturalisation) that is conditional upon current residence in the country. Such a policy could count as reparations only if beneficiaries were free to immigrate and take up residence in the country. Portugal’s revised Sephardic programme is a borderline case, since it allows for extraterritorial acquisition if the applicant has had past residence in the country but does not seem to guarantee free admission.

Finally, we do not consider policies that allow for extraterritorial citizenship acquisition based purely on an ancestor’s possession of citizenship if they are not intended to repair historic injustices but merely aim to reconnect a broken chain of citizenship transmissions among emigrants. Italy provides a perfect example for a policy of extraterritorial restoration of ancestral citizenship driven by the aim to politically reconnect with a large diaspora. The only harm that is meant to be repaired here concerns the fact that previous citizenship laws that did not tolerate dual nationality for expats. Unlike the cases of gender discrimination discussed above, this is not a harm calling for retroactive repair. The prohibition of dual citizenship was common policy backed by international legal norms until the late 20^th century and it did not apply unequally to different categories of citizens. Some cases may, however, be mixed in casting the net wider in order to catch those who have reparative claims alongside others. For example, the Spanish Democratic Memory Law does not check whether those who left the country between 1936 and 1955 had actually suffered persecution.

Motivations of states to offer and of individuals to accept reparative citizenship

In the range of cases that fall under our operational definition, a variety of motivations may be in play. The case of Ireland and the UK is the most straightforward, namely, the desire to end a damaging conflict that arose from the outcome of the negotiations between unequal parties on Ireland’s independence from Great Britain.

In the cases of direct injustice committed by states – by the Nazi regime in Austria and Germany, or by the Reyes Católicos and the Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal – the policy may be motivated by the moral desire to acknowledge a serious national wrong for which even later generations of citizens in these states, who are not individually guilty, feel an ongoing collective responsibility. Here, reparative policies affirm the state’s absolute rejection of its earlier incarnations while also sustaining public acknowledgment and memory of the past injustice. More cynically, the policies may be viewed as a state’s re-branding exercise aimed at reframing its international reputation – especially compared to states with analogous historical injustices that don’t enact such policies – or as a partisan move by a government differentiating itself from other political parties (and hoping to recruit electoral support on this basis).  It could also be a side-element in a policy of attracting desirable immigrants or removing grounds for rejection by desirable immigrants. Or it may, and most likely given the diverse actors in play in producing such legislation, involve a mix of these and perhaps other motives. These considerations also apply to cases of group-based discrimination (for example, against women) in nationality law.

In cases of border transformation represented by Hungary, Poland and Romania, the motives seem clearly related to nation-building in ways that express both non-instrumental and instrumental valuing of the nation as a form of human community. Yet this policy may also support historical revisionism with regard to internationally recognised borders. Instead of overtly reclaiming a lost territory, a country reclaims instead a lost population through bestowing citizenship. Such policies may have the effect of undermining similar nation-building efforts in a neighbouring country (as in the case of Moldova) or the stability of minority rights for kin minorities of the citizenship granting state (in the case of Hungary).

A case like that of Benin may be motivated by an acknowledgement of the moral evil that ancestor generations played a role in perpetuating but may also aim to establish the moral standing required to argue for a wider case of reparations both for slavery and for colonialism against other states involved in these crimes. Indeed, this case raises – and is likely intended to raise – the question of whether citizenship offers may be part of an appropriate response by the states that operated the slave trade.

And what motivates individuals who take up a reparative citizenship offer? There is a widespread assumption that most applicants have primarily instrumental motives. They are interested in a valuable passport, especially a European one that gives them access to and free movement within the world’s largest labour market. It also seems plausible to assume that instrumental motives will become stronger than identity-related ones the more generations have passed since the historic injustice occurred. Yet empirical research shows that individual motives are surprisingly often mixed. Jewish applicants for reparative citizenship in Austria and Germany feel torn between their revulsion against adopting the identity of countries where so many of their ancestral relatives have been killed and a sense of proudly reclaiming their Jewish identity as part of these countries’ history. In the case of Jews applying for Spanish and Portuguese citizenship, being active in a Sephardic community is a condition for the award and thus there is likely to be some selection in favour of identity-related motives. The same seems to be true for ethnic kin groups in territories outside the EU. They have very strong instrumental reasons to apply for a European passport and some programmes overtly advertise this as a main benefit. However, research shows that they also often feel strongly they have a special entitlement because of their cultural identity and history. Some may also develop deeper emotional ties ex post as an effect of acquiring a citizenship, even if they did so initially for purely instrumental reasons. After Brexit many UK citizens discovered their Irish ancestry with the obvious motive of maintaining their status and freedoms as EU citizens. But the real test for the idea that the value of reparative citizenship for individuals is entirely instrumental would be a large uptake of Irish Republic citizenship among the Unionist community in the North and we have not seen any evidence for this.

Justifications for reparative citizenship

With the interesting exception of Benin, all of these cases appeal, in one way or another, to the thought that the ancestors of those to whom the reparation policy is addressed were arbitrarily deprived of their citizenship and that this is a wrong for which reparation (whether restitution or compensation) is due.

Direct acts of injustice (persecution, expulsion, etc.) by the state (Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain) trigger the most straightforward justification for reparations. Given the presumption that those to whom the policy is addressed would be entitled to citizenship except for the injustice that was done to their ancestors, and that restitution is possible now, entitlements to citizenship should be restored. Just as a work of art stolen by the Nazi regime should be returned to those who legitimately possessed it or their descendants, so too should this rule apply to the entitlement to citizenship.

An open question is, however, how far back in time a justice-based claim to reparative citizenship can go. In the case of Spain’s and Portugal’s Sephardic Jews, it goes back to a time when there was no such thing as citizenship in the modern sense of the word. Hence restitution for the mass expulsions would more appropriately take the form of residency rights and access to full membership in the country rather than extraterritorial citizenship. The Spanish and Portuguese citizenship offers thus cannot be justified purely on grounds of necessary reparation. Instead, they aim at revising historical narratives about the nation by reclaiming its multireligious legacy against the authoritarian Catholicism that was the official ideology of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships. This is a legitimate and worthy cause, but it does not easily translate into individual entitlements to citizenship for the distant descendants of Jews expelled in the 1490s. From a reparative justice perspective, there is also the question of why the several million Muslims and Moriscos – a former Muslim population that had been coercively converted to Christianity – expelled between the late 15^th and early 17^th century should not have a similar claim to reparation as the Sephardic Jews. Finally, as argued by Michael R. James, if coercive minority identity oppression and its ongoing effects on individuals today is the appropriate normative reason for reparations, then the Saharawi have a stronger claim to Spanish citizenship than the descendants of Sephardic Jews and Moriscos. When Spain abandoned its colonial claims to Western Sahara it assured its population that they would be able to decide their political future through a self-determination referendum and it briefly offered them Spanish citizenship. Neither promise has been fulfilled, much of the Saharawi population remains in exile and stateless, and in 2022 Spain recognised Morocco’s plan to annex Western Sahara. From a normative perspective, the Spanish and Portuguese citizenship offers for Sephardic Jews seem at best permissible but certainly not a requirement of reparative justice, and the time limits and residential conditions recently adopted fall, in our view, within the discretion of democratic legislators. By adopting such policies, however, democratic legislators expose themselves to challenges about selective generosity and discrimination against other groups that may have equal or even stronger claims to citizenship reparations.  

Citizenship loss due to border transformations is a little different. In cases of mass expulsions of minorities, the injustice perpetrated by the state is beyond dispute. By contrast, whether border changes that resulted from peace settlements after international or civil wars were unjust and call for reparations is often contested. Where the new borders have been internationally recognised and where kin minorities deprived of their previous citizenship have been able to claim minority rights, offering them citizenship in an external kin state looks more like historical revanchism than a justice-based claim to reparation. Hungary’s policy and a failed attempt by an Austrian government to make a similar citizenship offer to German speakers in South Tyrol (which was part of Austria until 1918) provide clear examples. Romania’s policy seems to fit the same category. Moldova is an independent state whose borders are internationally recognised and whose territorial integrity is a crucial precondition for its stability and development as a democracy. The fact that part of its territory (Transnistria) is controlled by pro-Russian separatists is as destabilising in this respect as calls for reunification with a “Greater Romania”. Romania’s offer of EU passports may be popular in Moldova, and it does not privilege an ethnic minority. Yet these are not reasons for calling it an act of reparative justice.  

The Irish case seems to us the clearest example where citizenship restoration can be defended on grounds of reparative justice in a territorial dispute. The partition of Ireland, which was manufactured to maintain Protestant supremacy in the North, has not resulted in stable borders with equal citizenship for all and minority rights for Catholics. Perceptions of historic injustice were instead kept alive through discrimination and the Irish Republic did not accept the border as settled forever. It was in this context that Eire introduced the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act that granted people who were born in Northern Ireland the right to choose Irish citizenship. Moreover, the status of Northern Ireland is not that of an integral part of the United Kingdom. Under the Belfast Agreement, it can be changed if a majority in the territory wants to join the Irish Republic or to form an independent country. The purpose of reconciliation and the possibility of democratically agreed border changes provide additional justifications for the Irish citizenship offer, whereas in the Romanian-Moldovan case the policy may need to be constrained in order to avoid fuelling irredentist claims by a larger neighbour.

In the third type of case, restoration for discriminatory deprivation of citizenship through past editions of nationality laws, there is a perfect match between harm and remedy and a reparative justification is more straightforward. The main difficulty seems to lie in the practicalities of restoration if several generations have passed since the incriminated provisions were applied. Gender discrimination in nationality law became finally outlawed in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. When democratic states started to implement this norm, many adopted initially minimal reforms that provided women married to foreign husbands or children born to national mothers and foreign husbands short windows of opportunity to acquire citizenship. When these time limits were later challenged in court, retroactive citizenship was extended back in time. Yet, just as with the descendants of minorities expelled long time ago, citizenship awards risk becoming inflationary if they are based on a hypothetical transmission chain that might also have been interrupted by voluntary renunciation or a lack of interest among earlier generations in claiming an ancestor’s citizenship.  

The exceptional case of Benin raises the question of whether citizenship might be an appropriate form of reparations for wrongs that do not consist in an unjust loss of citizenship that breaks the chain of transmission. Here we would highlight the point that it is part of the moral injury of slavery that it cut off those who were transported and their descendants from their historical communities not just in space but also in time and memory. With a few lucky exceptions of the kind dramatised in Alex Haley’s book Roots, the descendants of slaves can hope at best to discover the ports from which their enslaved ancestors were shipped. It is this problem of historical documentation and memory that provides a pro tanto justification for the Benin law.

So how far do reparative justifications go? In a tort law approach, citizenship is regarded as a purely private good, analogous to a real estate property or an art object, that ought to be restored to the rightful owner or their heirs. Even if the heirs are not aware of the unlawful origin of their possession, restitution is due. However, citizenship is a relational good that inextricably combines individual and public elements. It involves a horizontal relation of equality to other citizens and a vertical relation with state institutions whose power is derived from citizens’ consent or authorisation and which need to protect citizens’ rights and freedoms. In order to work well, the vertical relation requires a fair amount of horizontal solidarity and some orientation towards the ‘common good’ that citizens and political authorities are assumed to share.  

This characteristic feature of citizenship explains why it is reasonable to ask of immigrants, and even of refugees, that they reside in the state for some time before they can become citizens. It also explains why states should reject unlimited ius sanguinis as a principle of citizenship transmission abroad, a feature which matters particularly for democratic states in which voting rights are mostly made available to non-resident citizens. A first concern is thus whether ‘citizenship as reparations’ fails to sufficiently acknowledge the state’s responsibility towards current citizens, residents, and the good of citizenship itself. In other words, there may be sometimes conflicts between citizenship restitution on grounds of historic justice and “democratic stakeholder” requirements for citizenship inclusion in the present.

The border transformation cases raise a second concern. The institution of citizenship is not just an internal matter for states but concerns also relations between states. This raises the question of whether such policies have destabilising effects on other states in ways that matter for their political justification.

A final concern that we discuss in the next section is whether reparative citizenship policies are discriminatory in a way that undermines their legitimacy. All of these problems lead us to ask in our conclusions whether the reparative ends at which such policies aim do in fact require the granting of citizenship status or could be also realised through other forms of compensation that lack the negative side-effects we have listed here.

Discriminatory Effects

One obvious problem that can arise with policies offering citizenship as reparations is that they treat similar groups differently. As mentioned above, Spain has not offered citizenship to descendants of the Muslims and Moriscos expelled shortly after the Jews nor to the Saharawi. The recent German and Austrian policies apply to all victims of the Nazi regime, for example, to Roma and Sinti as well as Jews. However, even in these cases there may be some indirect discrimination built into the policy, as Roma and Sinti often did not have formal and documented citizenship status before Nazi rule. If a minority was unjustly excluded from citizenship for a long period of history, restitution cannot be grounded in the fiction of mending an otherwise interrupted chain of citizenship transmissions.

Discrimination between equally entitled groups may result not only from flawed policies of the states making a reparative citizenship offer, but also from the policies of the states whose citizens these groups currently are. If the latter states withdraw their citizenship upon the voluntary acquisition of foreign nationality, a reparative citizenship offer by another country becomes inaccessible. Diasporas generated by mass expulsions and genocide are often spread across many different countries. Some of the descendants of Sephardic Jews or Nazi victims will therefore not be able to take up a reparative citizenship because they would then lose the citizenship they acquired at birth. In the case of lost territory, kin minorities are concentrated in one or several neighbouring countries. If these do not allow their citizens to acquire another nationality, a reparative offer falls flat for the whole target group. As we have seen in the Polish case, such non-toleration of dual citizenship has motivated the introduction of Karta Polaka as a substitute.

Another difficult question is whether states making reparative citizenship offers thereby discriminate against other current and potential citizens who were or are required to meet a more demanding set of requirements for the acquisition of citizenship. One objection to ‘golden passports’ for investors is that they allow the super-rich to acquire citizenship without the normal naturalisation requirements. Would the same objection apply to unconditional reparative grants of citizenship? Although such grants are not transactional in the way ‘golden passports’ are, an unconditional right to citizenship similarly bypasses the reasons that justify residency and language requirements for immigrant naturalisation, namely, an assumed commitment to the autonomy and common good of the political community. In this respect, policies that demand tokens of commitment, such as some period of prior residency (Portugal), language (Romania, Hungary) or active engagement in a diaspora group (Spain, Poland) appear preferable to those that do not.

In other words, reparative citizenship programmes should meet and reconcile their two implied goals: repair unjust past deprivations without undermining the integrity of citizenship as membership in a distinct political community. This highlights a concern that matters regardless of whether a reparative citizenship policy is unconditional or not, namely, whether it discriminates against the legitimate purposes of other states. If Romania’s policy undermines the nation-building project of the relatively new state of Moldova or Hungary’s policy undermines the stability of minority rights in Slovakia and Romania, these negative effects speak against the political justifiability of these ways of making reparations.  

Decolonial reparations

What of the reparations owed by former imperial states to their former colonies? Might citizenship as reparations be appropriate here? Germany was a late coloniser in Africa but it engaged in genocidal actions notably against the Ovaherero and Nama people in South-West Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908. Would not citizenship be just as appropriate a form of reparations here as in the case of Nazi Germany’s genocide in Europe? Even where colonialism was merely brutally violent, rather than genocidal, and involved the extraction and transfer of wealth and resources to Europe with effects on global patterns of advantage and disadvantage that remain present, isn’t there a case for reparative access to citizenship as a mode of amends?

The progressive multiplication of forms of British nationality is an example that might support this view. Among these many statuses, “British citizenship” is the only one granting entry and residence rights in the UK and access to this status has been increasingly restricted since the 1960s in ways designed to exclude Commonwealth subjects. Shouldn’t the earlier single status for UK and Colonial citizens be restored for the Commonwealth descendants of those excluded from it by later restrictions? This would make British citizenship widely available to those whose ancestors were subject to the injustice of British colonial rule.

While reparations for colonialism are certainly due and there may be specific contexts in which grants of citizenship are appropriate, any general adoption of citizenship as reparations generates the problem of failing to reconcile the repair of unjust past deprivations with sustaining the integrity of citizenship in postcolonial as well as postimperial states. The harm that was inflicted on former colonial subjects when imperial rule ended was not that citizenship of the newly created states was separated from subjecthood in the former colonial power. This was, on the contrary, a crucial aspect of independence. The harm lay in denying them migration rights they had earlier enjoyed (albeit often only on paper or for a small colonial elite) and in failing to transfer resources owed to them as a reparations for colonial exploitation. A better avenue for decolonial reparations is therefore provided by resource transfers and migration rights that support the autonomy and flourishing of those disadvantaged states and peoples.

Conclusions

The practice of providing citizenship as reparations for past injustice undoubtedly has a place in the repertoire of contemporary states. In the case of repairing unjust gender discrimination in nationality law, there is certainly a justification for the citizenship claims of the children and grandchildren of those subject to the injustice. In cases such as peace-building or democracy restoration after civil conflict (Ireland and Spain), it may be the only way of realising the valuable end. Even if it is not strictly required, there may be other contexts where it is a fitting response given the scale and moral seriousness of the injustice for which the state aims to make reparations (Austria/Germany and genocide).

But more generally the difficulty of reconciling the reparative aims with respect for the institution of citizenship and the legitimate ends of other states suggests that these purposes may often be better served by other means. These may include a quasi-citizenship status involving a bundle of rights. An example along these lines is provided by the Karta Polaka. This type of reparative measure has several advantages. In terms of scope, it encompasses descendants who are eligible for dual nationality and those who are not. It does not undermine the integrity of citizenship in Poland or elsewhere. And, despite the objections of the authoritarian regime in Belarus, it is likely to support positive relations between Poland and the states in which its diaspora dwells.

In general, we argue that the use of citizenship as reparations needs to be responsive to a range of criteria including the seriousness of the moral injury committed by the state, the fit between the injury and the remedy, the effects of the reparative grant of citizenship on the integrity of citizenship in the awarding state and other affected states, as well as relations of comity between these states. To the extent that the legitimate ends of such reparative policies can be accomplished in ways that are more responsive to the ethical and political values expressed in these criteria, we have good reason to adopt such alternative means. Citizenship as reparations should be generally reserved for those cases where the alignment of seriousness, fittingness, and effects is best served by this policy.

Although it does not strictly fall within the terms of our definition, we have also considered the case of Benin’s new citizenship law because it represents a distinct use of citizenship as reparations in which the remedy does not match the injury. The grant of citizenship to those whose ancestors were trafficked through Benin is a second-best option for reasons that relate to the specifics of the case of transatlantic slavery. As a second-best option, however, it is a case where the policy is justified as only a provisional measure which could, and should, be superseded by a future set of reparations for slavery by slave-trafficking and slave-holding states that offer a more adequate and fitting response to the moral evil to which Benin’s law draws attention. 

We are very grateful for Amanda Frost’s and Reinhard Schweitzer’s comments on a draft.