The independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean – all of them former British colonies – share a common constitutional provision, according to which individuals are disqualified from standing for election if they are under a voluntary acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign state. In this article, I argue that judicial interpretations of this ‘foreign allegiance disqualification’ have been decisively shaped by inherited ideas drawn from the English medieval and British imperial laws of subjecthood. The first of these ideas is the assumption that holding citizenship of a state necessarily gives rise to allegiance to that state. The second is the notion that citizenship and allegiance are singular and uniform across the former territory of the British Empire, now the Commonwealth of Nations. The third is the conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state as hierarchical and quasi-contractual, wherein the citizen’s allegiance is extracted in return for the protection of the state. The region’s post-independence constitutional citizenship jurisprudence thus remains more ‘Commonwealth’ than distinctively ‘Caribbean’ in character, with the consequence that the boundaries of democratic membership continue to be defined by reference to a conceptual framework of the former coloniser’s making.

Timothy Jacob-Owens, Foreign allegiance and constitutional citizenship: postcolonial (dis)continuities in the Commonwealth Caribbean, Comparative Constitutional Studies, 2024.