Introduction and Response by Lior Erez and comments by Daniel Sharp, Rainer Bauböck, Rebecca Buxton, Patti Tamara Lenard, and Jules Lepoutre
INTRODUCTION
Introduction for GLOBALCIT Symposium on ‘Citizenship Renunciation without Emigration’
Lior Erez (CEVIPOF, Sciences Po)
Contemporary international law and liberal political theory broadly endorse the right to change or renounce one’s nationality. However, this right comes with an important constraint: states universally condition renunciation on territorial exit. In order to renounce citizenship, an individual is required to emigrate or demonstrate habitual residence abroad. This constraint is assumed, even if not explicitly endorsed, by normative theorists of the right to renounce. In my recent article, ‘Citizenship Renunciation without Emigration’ (American Political Science Review, 2025), I argue against this constraint: individuals should have the right to renounce their citizenship while staying put.
The article opens by identifying a dilemma for liberal theorists. On the one hand, long-term residents in democracies are granted the legal right to naturalise but are free to choose whether to exercise this right; in other words, they can voluntarily choose whether to decline full political membership while remaining social members present in the territory. But resident citizens are not free to make this choice – they must either remain in their current status, or – if they wish to renounce their citizenship – leave. I argue that this is inconsistent.
One way out of this inconsistency, of course, is to argue that the naturalisation of long-term residents should be mandatory. I analyse two arguments in support of this view. According to one line of argument, mandatory naturalisation is required in order to protect fundamental individual autonomy. According to a second, more republican line of argument – most famously advanced by Helder de Schutter and Lea Ypi – keeping naturalisation optional is objectionable for three reasons. First, it constitutes free-riding on public goods to which citizens contribute. Second, it undermines social cohesion. Third, it violates a democratic duty to take on the political office of the citizen. For reasons elaborated in the article, I find these arguments unpersuasive. But I also make the stronger claim that allowing for the right to renounce citizenship without emigrating has a positive role from within democratic theory.
In brief, I argue that renouncing one’s citizenship is a political act, a form of expressive political exit. Theorists of the right to emigrate understand it not only as a special case of the right to free movement, but as an instrumental mechanism of accountability and as an expressive form of exit. Similarly, individuals renounce their citizenship not merely for individual interests, but as an expression of their rejection of the state’s legitimate authority. In a famous case, Garry Davis, a former B17 bomber pilot, renounced his American citizenship in Paris in 1948 in protest of militarism and in support of a world government. By renouncing citizenship, the individual removes themselves from the political community and thus rejects the rights and duties that are linked to that particular citizenship.
However, given the unavoidable costs of emigration even in the most favourable circumstances, we encounter a Humean-style objection: even when there is a formal right to emigrate, enacting this right can be prohibitively costly to the agent as to make this right otiose. In other words, conditioning renunciation on emigration makes the act more costly: it forces individuals to abandon their homes, support networks, jobs, and cultural roots in order to express their resistance to the government. Decoupling the right to renounce from the requirement to emigrate will make it more effective as an act of expressive legitimacy contestation.
I conclude the article by considering two objections to the proposal. According to the first, allowing individuals to renounce their citizenship too freely is a slippery slope towards anarchism. My argument will appear to rely on an ideal of a “sovereign individual,” for whom affiliations, obligations, and commitments are fully voluntary and can be shirked at will. My response is that this objection arises from a conflation between political obligations that arise from social membership and those that arise from the legal status of citizenship. In my view, many political obligations that arise from duties of fair play, the natural duty of justice, or associative duties, are not unique to citizens and are shared by other long-term members. Renouncing one’s citizenship does not release one from those obligations, and so does not lead to unacceptable anarchism.
But if this is the case, doesn’t this turn the act of renouncing citizenship into an empty symbolic act? This is the second objection to my argument, which requires me to say what difference citizenship renunciation makes if many of the familiar political, social and economic rights and duties usually associated with it remain in place. My answer, in brief, has to do with collective responsibility for the actions of the state. Citizens and non-citizens alike share a liability for the state’s actions and could justifiably incur the costs of addressing the wrongs it commits. Only citizens, however, share in collective responsibility for those actions, in the sense that the actions are done ‘in their name’. Because the actions of the state are done in their name, they have a forward-looking responsibility to repair their state, independently of whether they can be said to contribute to it, benefit from it, or endorse its actions. Building on Avia Pasternak’s account of intentional citizenship, I argue that participation in the state must be genuine if citizens are to share in this collective responsibility. The option to renounce citizenship, as a formal and legal act, provides a clear option for expressing the lack of intentional citizenship, and, by omission, choosing not to renounce is further evidence of participatory intentions.