Is Citizenship Restitution Through Time-extended Ius Sanguinis a Pathway to Post-national Citizenship?
Melissa Blanchard (National Centre for Scientific Research, Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille)
In their kick-off paper, David Owen and Rainer Bauböck ask how far back in time a justice-based claim to reparative citizenship can go. Through a concrete example, I’ll show that this is a crucial question because it defines the scope and boundaries of a state’s citizenship. Until March 2025, Italy provided a pathway to citizenship restitution for the descendants of Italian women who had been denied Italian citizenship due to discriminatory laws requiring patrilineal descent. While restitution was not explicitly stipulated in Italian citizenship law, it emerged through civil court jurisprudence on equal rights for women and men.
Restitution citizenship in court as a means of redressing group discrimination under the law
Before March 2025, the Italian nationality law made it particularly easy for descendants of emigrants to acquire citizenship. This law was based on a time-extended interpretation of ius sanguinis, which stated that in order to acquire Italian citizenship, it was necessary to demonstrate that one had an Italian grandparent who was alive at the time of national unification in 1861. There were no generational limits, residence conditions or requirements for language proficiency or cultural links to Italy. However, Italian citizenship law contained significant gender-based restrictions: until 1948, Italian women could not transmit citizenship to their children, and, until 1975, they lost their citizenship if they married a foreign man. This meant that their children took their husband’s nationality. So, Italian citizenship law engendered a discriminatory deprivation of citizenship towards women as a group. After the Italian citizenship law recognised dual citizenship in 1992, descendants of Italian women who had emigrated abroad filed numerous court cases challenging this discrimination and seeking citizenship recognition. Cases increased especially in the wake of the dramatic 2001 default crisis that hit Argentina, and again after the COVID-19 pandemic. They ended up creating a jurisprudence over restitution, based on the application of the Italian Constitution to citizenship legislation.
The process of equalising women’s rights in matters of citizenship took different steps. The first step was the enforcement of the Constitution of the newly formed Italian Republic on 1 January 1948. The Constitution’s articles on equality before the law allowed women to transmit their citizenship to their children. Still, children born before 1948 remained unable to claim citizenship through their mothers. A second step was taken in 1975, when the Italian Constitutional Court issued a ruling that declared the automatic loss of citizenship upon marriage to be unconstitutional. Once again, this ruling was not retroactive. A third step occurred in 1983, when the Constitutional Court ruled that the requirement for patrilineal transmission in the Italian citizenship law was unconstitutional due to its discriminatory treatment of women. Following this, a law was enacted, affirming that a child of an Italian mother or father is an Italian citizen. This law applied to children born after January 1, 1948. The fourth and final step happened in 2009, when the Supreme Court of Cassation (Italy’s highest court of appeal) determined that the constitutional principle of gender equality should be applied retroactively to all citizenship claims, regardless of when the claimant was born (Court of Cassation decision no. 4466 of 2009). This ruling established that individuals born before 1 January 1948 and seeking citizenship through their maternal line (the “1948 cases”) should address Italian civil courts rather than consulates or municipalities, thereby creating an administrative-judicial divide. While consulates and municipalities still rejected applications from individuals born to Italian mothers before 1948 in accordance with Italian citizenship law, civil courts have consistently recognised such claims based on recent jurisprudence derived from constitutional rulings.
The current right-wing Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni introduced a significant change through a Decree-Law issued on 28 March 2025 and definitively approved on 23 May 2025 (law no. 74/2025). This new law tightens the criteria for acquiring Italian citizenship abroad through ius sanguinis. The legislation introduces three major restrictions: first, eligibility is now limited to second-generation applicants only. This means they must have a parent or grandparent who held Italian citizenship at the time of their death. Second, applicants must demonstrate that their transmitting parent or grandparent either held exclusively Italian citizenship – which eliminates the previous provision allowing dual citizens to pass on nationality – or lived in Italy for two consecutive years after obtaining Italian citizenship and before the applicant’s birth or adoption.
Time-extended restitution practices lead to a market for citizenship acquisitions
The Italian citizenship law, combined with the jurisprudence on citizenship restitution through the maternal line, triggered an inflation of citizenship acquisitions, particularly among descendants of emigrants born in Latin American countries with large Italian immigrant populations, such as Brazil and Argentina. It is estimated that between 1998 and 2012, Italy granted citizenship to one million descendants of Italian emigrants born abroad, and our evidence suggests that at least one million more acquired Italian citizenship between 2012 and 2025. Research shows that interest in Italian citizenship often stems not from an attachment to Italy or Italian culture, but from the desire of applicants to acquire a European Union passport and its associated benefits (extensive mobility rights, work and education opportunities, access to healthcare and social security). This additional citizenship can compensate for the limited mobility rights granted by the applicants’ original citizenship, as Peter Spiro points out.
Restitution through maternal descent, along with provisions for emigrants’ descendants from the paternal line – which are not restitutive themselves – led to the emergence of a market for citizenship acquisition. With the number of candidates exponentially growing every year and Latin American countries, like Argentina, experiencing difficult economic times, thousands of candidates for Italian citizenship chose to go through the judicial procedure in Italy. In the project Ancestral Citizenships in Europe we have documented a flourishing industry of legal intermediaries based in countries of origin and in Italy (consultants, lawyers, genealogists and, above all, social media influencers), both Italian and South American, that help candidates to trace back their ancestry and face the bureaucratic process. The range of services offered by intermediaries varies from the most basic, which focuses solely on obtaining documents from the civil registry or religious archives in the ancestor’s place of birth, to an “all-inclusive” package. The latter encompasses the short-term rental of an apartment in Italy, as well as tours aimed at discovering local culture and cuisine, assistance with finding ancestral documents and contacts for the judicial or administrative procedure. The market for Italian citizenship is segmented like any other market. According to our data, services offered by legal intermediaries cost between 3,500 and 9,500 euros per person. Clearly, this market aims to attract the wealthiest members of the candidate population seeking Italian citizenship, as these sums constitute a considerable financial burden for middle-class families in Brazil and Argentina and prevent large segments of the population from participating. So, candidates for Italian citizenship are selected not only on an “ethnic” criterion (ius sanguinis), but also on economic grounds. Even though the sums at stake are of a different magnitude, this bears a striking resemblance to citizenship by investment programmes and means that many of the restitution grants through the maternal line are transactional.
Some prospective Italian citizens gather with other family members and go through the judicial process collectively to share the costs. A mediatised case that will soon be examined by the Constitutional Court, for example, involves a group of twelve Brazilian descendants of an Italian woman born in Italy in 1874 who emigrated as a child. The descendants are seeking citizenship restoration through the maternal line based on this single Italian ancestor. Judicial cases have been reported where 50 to 75 people asked for Italian citizenship based on descent from only one ancestor.
The result of these schemes, which the Italian State tolerated until recently, is a series of discriminatory effects against other ordinary candidates for citizenship. First, against those who, born in South America, cannot afford the expensive process of acquiring Italian citizenship through ius sanguinis. Second, against those who were born in Italy but lack comparable rights – specifically, the children of immigrants who must meet highly restrictive residence and language requirements to qualify for naturalisation. If, as Owen and Bauböck say, one objection to “golden passports” for investors is that they enable the wealthiest candidates to obtain citizenship without meeting the usual naturalisation criteria, the same objection can be made to time-extended reparative grants of Italian citizenship. Restitution practices, along with a time-extended ius sanguinis principle, contribute to bringing about a form of selective citizenship, as Ashley Mantha-Hollands and Tymothy Jacob-Owens pinpoint, as well as selective immigration routes, as shown by Reinhard Schweitzer and Tina Magazzini. This ethnically selective immigration was an expected outcome and a goal of the Italian state, as evidenced not only by the initial parliamentary debates on Italian citizenship (1912), but also by the fact that, over the past decades, Italian delegations have made substantive efforts to recruit workers among Italian emigrant associations in South America. Provisions for co-ethnic manpower immigration, without citizenship requirements, are also included in the recently approved law 74/2025.
Post-national citizenship is not necessarily a bad thing
Extended time limits for citizenship restitution through the maternal line resulted in an increase in demands for Italian citizenship. The fact that thousands of people need intermediaries to support their claims suggests that their connection to their Italian ancestry is weak and distant. As David Owen and Rainer Bauböck point out, restitutions are based on the hypothesis of a transmission chain, but this chain may have been interrupted by earlier generations voluntarily renouncing their citizenship or losing interest in claiming it. I agree with them that the restitution of citizenship on grounds of historic injustice, if not limited in time, can conflict with the state’s responsibilities towards current citizens and residents. Moreover, the ethnic principle that makes these restitutions possible — transmission through time-extended ius sanguinis — paradoxically leads to a weakening of citizenship, as Peter Spiro points out. This is because recipients often do not associate Italian citizenship with feeling part of a community, but with material considerations. Of course, emotional and strategic ties to ancestral citizenship often coexist. What is interesting here is that, ironically enough, Italian ethnic provisions based on ius sanguinis led to post-national citizenship, a citizenship that, for its new recipients, is disconnected from the idea of nationhood, i.e. of belonging to a community of nationals.
Given this fact, the Italian state chose to move in order to regain coherence in what it wanted its citizenship to mean. It could choose between opening citizenship to non-ethnic residents and embracing post-national citizenship, or reinforcing ethno-national citizenship by limiting it to the descendants of emigrants up to a certain degree of ancestry. The Italian government has opted for the latter with Law 74/2025, restricting access to the extraterritorial acquisition and restitution of Italian citizenship for descendants up to two generations. This law was introduced by Meloni’s coalition, but did not originate from her own party, which has historically advocated extensive rights for the Italian diaspora. The bill was initially criticised by the Lega party, which is part of the coalition and has a strong presence in the regions of origin of the emigrants, while the opposition has voted against it.
The government could have made another choice and accepted post-national citizenship. Post-national, identity-light citizenship is a transformation of citizenship as we knew it, but not necessarily a bad one, provided it maintains a balance between individual rights and civic responsibilities. Such citizenship must be grounded in a consensual social contract between the individual, the state, and the broader community of citizens, a contract based on shared civic commitment rather than ethnic (or blood) proximity. This could have restored justice and equity among all the citizenship “stakeholders”, in other terms between people born in Italy to Italian parents, people born in Italy to foreign parents and residing in the country, long-term foreign residents, and people with Italian ancestry who were born and reside overseas.