Citizenship Reparations: The Devils and Angels Lie in the Details
Szabolcs Pogonyi (Central European University, Vienna)
The debate on reparative citizenship has focused on both the normative dilemmas and the pragmatic implications of offering membership as a means of historical justice. In this comment, I will first engage with the normative issues. I argue that instead of a blanket, meta-level normative assessment of qualitatively different policies grouped under the label of reparative citizenship, we should zoom in and evaluate the pragmatic desirability of specific cases. I will also make a minor, unrelated comment on the broader implications of compensatory citizenship for nationalism.
Two normative principles that are difficult to combine
David Owen and Rainer Bauböck define reparative citizenship as a status offered “for persons who live permanently outside the state’s territory and are descendants of persons who have lost their citizenship […] under conditions for which the current state bears responsibility”. This formulation leaves open the question why states may feel responsibility for historical injustice. One obvious possibility is that states want to compensate for harm they caused. Yet the targets of reparative citizenship defined thus are not the actual victims of illegitimate denaturalisation but their descendants. No doubt, as Christoph Sperfeldt has pointed out, in situ stateless individuals are subject to injustice and suffer harm, but Owen and Bauböck exclude habitually resident populations from the scope of reparative citizenship. Should we consider as ‘victims’ at all those non-resident individuals whose (often very distant) ancestors were deprived of citizenship? In many of the commonly discussed cases, it would be very difficult to claim so on the grounds of utilitarian moral theories. Descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century can hardly be reasonably considered as ‘victims’ of the inhumane and unjust expulsions after the Reconquista. If the utilitarian harm principle was applied in citizenship attribution, eligibility should not be determined by historical injustice but rather by the overall utility of inclusion in the citizenry.
Rather than following the utilitarian logic, one could apply deontological reasoning and claim that the restoration of citizenship is a moral duty. Regardless of whether descendants of once unjustly excluded individuals suffered harm or not, restoration of their membership is a matter of principle. In this view, citizenship is perceived as a fundamental right or an asset. Following the logic of tort law, it does not matter when the original injustice happened; unjust deprivation of citizenship must be redressed to restore fairness and the rule of law. Entitlement-based approaches (both rights-focused and asset-focused variations) seem more salient than the application of the utilitarian harm principle, but they compromise the citizenship stakeholder principle. If eligibility to citizenship is determined as a property right, individuals who have no genuine ties to the state and whose autonomy and well-being are not dependent on the future of the political community may nevertheless be eligible for membership.
Most of the normative dilemmas related to reparative citizenship boil down to the tension between such entitlement arguments and the stakeholder principle. One way to circumvent this normative dilemma is to offer alternative means of reparation instead of citizenship (see Timothy Jacob-Owens’ contribution). Another is to try to square the two normative principles. Some of the contributors in the forum try to balance the two approaches by proposing rules that recognise the validity of the entitlement-focused argument while at the same time also acknowledging the stakeholder principle. This is why a number of contributors support some form of reparative citizenship (following from the entitlement approach) as long as they meet specific conditions (as defined by the stakeholder principle). In fact, this logic is also reflected in the existing policies. Some countries offer conditional reparative citizenship and require some (even if very loosely defined) proof of genuine ties to the current political community (e.g. some knowledge of the national language) at naturalisation.
Why policy intentions matter
Typically, the normative debate engages with the topic without taking into account the differences of reparative citizenship policies. In order to offer generic normative guidelines, the nuances of the different policy measures are ignored. Variations in actual policies are considered as normatively irrelevant minor differences. In reality, preferential naturalisation of non-resident individuals based on ancestry does not, or not only serve historical justice even when this is being claimed by governments. In their kick-off piece, Owen and Bauböck mention that facilitated naturalisation of non-resident ethnic kin is often justified by restoration of citizenship even if governments have other intentions. Among other motives, they may just want to reconnect with descendants of expatriates (Italy) and transborder minorities (Hungary, Romania, Poland) in order to change electoral balances, facilitate immigration (as argued by Reinhard Schweitzer and Tina Magazzini), reach geopolitical objectives, or boost their soft power abroad. As pointed out by Alfons Aragoneses, states also use such policies for nation branding purposes. In Germany, Austria and Spain, reparative citizenship is an important symbolic means of historical reconciliation and acknowledgement of democratic norms. In other cases (Hungary), non-resident citizenship is used by the Fidesz party to brand itself as an ethno-nationalist government and accuse the liberal left-wing opposition of ignoring national interest.
These examples show that similar policies may serve normatively very different objectives. In some cases, the same policy may have both normatively desirable as well as undesirable consequences, including unintended ones. For example, non-resident citizenship introduced by the Hungarian government in 2010 as a compensation for transborder Hungarians whose descendants lost Hungarian citizenship as a result of border changes in 1920 is used by Viktor Orbán’s party to secure additional votes from transborder Hungarians and also to get some leverage over the politics of its neighbours. But the same policy also provides ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine, Israel and Venezuela (many of whom do not have anything that resembles genuine ties to Hungary) with opportunities to escape war and conflict.
This is not to say that the normative assessment of reparative citizenship policies is a futile and irrelevant effort. What I have tried to point out is that the more abstract the discussion becomes, the less likely we are to find a useful normative guiding principle that can be applied without caveats. Inevitably, there are reparative citizenship policies which are clearly unjust. These include the involuntary ascription of citizenship (see Jocelyn Kane and Patti Tamara Lenard in this forum) as well as ethnically/racially selective application of reparative citizenship (see the contributions by Ashley Mantha-Holland, and Nikitha Aithal, Helena Cook, Marnie Lloydd and Julija Sardelić). At the other end of the scale, German and Spanish citizenship reacquisition laws targeting not too distant descendants of victims of past undemocratic regimes can hardly be considered as morally illegitimate, even if we do not consider it as a moral obligation for states to offer compensatory citizenship. As Lior Erez convincingly argues, in most cases, there is neither a normative obligation for states to offer reparative citizenship nor is it illegitimate to do so as long as they do not misuse it. The pragmatic benefits of such policies should be decided by zooming in rather than engaging with them from a birds’ eye normative perspective.
A nationalist paradox
Let me conclude by making an unrelated, non-normative observation concerning the paradoxical implications of reparative citizenship on nationhood. As I mentioned above, in some cases, reparative citizenship policies are introduced with nationalist claims when the intention is a symbolic restoration of the nation torn apart by border changes or migration. But even in the absence of nationalist intentions, reparative citizenship entrenches the national habitus as it builds on tacit nationalist assumptions. Most importantly, the idea of reparative citizenship assumes an intergenerational historic responsibility for a nation’s past and solidarity with distant descendants of co-nationals. Reparations are offered in the name of the nation for (lost) members of the nation. At the same time, in line with the asset logic of membership, reparative citizenship is offered for individuals who may have no genuine ties to the nation or the state. In some cases, even those non-resident individuals can benefit from the nation-framed reparations who do not speak the national language and have no social ties to the current population. Thus, reparative citizenship attenuates the nationalist understanding of nationhood even if offered by nationalist governments. Paradoxically, the more expansive the understanding of nationhood is, the broader the scope of national historical responsibility, the more the application of reparative citizenship compromises national homogeneity. As hinted by Peter Spiro as well as Melissa Blanchard, the inclusion of distant descendants of former citizens weakens the cultural homogeneity as well as the civic solidarity of the nation.