Three Problems with Citizenship Reparations: They are Selective, Transactional, and Potentially Dangerous
Jelena Džankić (European University Institute)
A random conversation somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere:
You’re Mexican, but you live in Paris?
Yes, but on a Spanish passport. You know, Spain has this law where it allows descendants of Sephardic Jews to obtain citizenship. So, my entire family got Spanish passports; and almost 70 other people from my village.
Was it difficult?
Look, we hired this firm; it was enough to have money. And if you go back in time that much, anyone can find a relative that was wronged by some authority.
My friend was right. And if we adopt David Owen and Rainer Bauböck’s definition, any descendant of an exilee (and history teaches us there have been many of those), any inhabitant of any former colonised land (and there have been many of those, too), or anyone with a female ancestor who was married to a foreigner before the 1940s, might have a normative claim for citizenship restoration. And yes – absolutely – sporting more than one passport, especially if it is one that comes with the perks of free movement in the European Union (EU), comes in handy to anyone who has not had much luck with the ‘birthright lottery’. However, citizenship restoration policies are not about individuals and the wrongs suffered by their ancestors. Citizenship restoration policies are instruments for governments of contemporary states to articulate their present-day interests – be those interests financial or power-driven. In some ways, they are like investor citizenship, which Owen and Bauböck and Peter Spiro have already mentioned in this forum. Both policies are instrumentalised by individuals, both are instrumentalised by states, and – as Melissa Blanchard notes in her text – both come along with a network of transnational intermediaries. Both are selective, transactional, and dangerous. These are the three key problems with citizenship restoration policies, that target external populations. Those seeking to address injustice in situ – as argued by Christoph Sperfeldt and Szabolcs Pogonyi – have a different logic and perhaps warrant a separate discussion.
Only for ‘the Chosen Ones’
My first objection to reparatory citizenship policies is that they are highly selective and often racialised, as already highlighted by Ashley Mantha-Hollands, Nikitha Aithal, Helena Cook, Marnie Lloydd, and Julija Sardelić. This also makes them discriminatory and unjust towards groups that suffered harm but were left outside the scope of these policies. Take, for example, the Portuguese or the Spanish laws that ‘restore’ citizenship to the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century. As Owen and Bauböck already noted, there is the looming question as to why the Muslims and Moriscos, who suffered the same historical injustice, in the same period, by the same colonial powers, are excluded from the present-day reparatory policies. This kind of selective approach in determining who is ‘worthy’ of being granted membership has an important element of ‘othering’ based on racial-religious lines. It has at its core an ‘orientalisation’ of citizenship based on the presumption of backwardness, inferiority or primitive nature of Muslim identities and practices compared to Western values. Such an ‘orientalisation’ has characterised the Spanish public discourse on migration, as well as immigration law.
The problematic selective nature of reparatory citizenship policies becomes even more complex in the post-colonial context, where those who should receive some form of compensation for historical injustice (or their descendants) were indigenous communities expelled or annihilated in the process of colonial conquest. Bronwen Manby’s contribution to this forum shows how the paradox of selection plays out across African states, where reparatory policies are crafted not by the former imperial powers responsible for expulsions, genocide and slave trade, but by the post-colonial successor states that have taken up the burden of recompense. The cases of Namibia, Liberia, and other African states providing preferential citizenship access to members of certain racial and ethnic groups – while understandable in the historical context– are also highly selective.
While selection is an inherent element of all aspects of citizenship policies, from birthright attribution to any kind of subsequent admission, the selective application of reparative policies indicates an equally selective approach to history. As Lior Erez reminds us, victims of historical injustices were not homogenous communities, but rather “heterogeneous groups, with different and sometimes conflicting reparative claims”. Injustices, throughout time and different iterations of contemporary sovereign states, have been many and towards many. Regardless of who compensates the historical wrongdoing by means of citizenship grant, selecting who benefits from reparatory policies needs a careful consideration of why a particular instance of historical harm has been selected and not another, and why a particular community should benefit from it and not another.
A Quid Pro Quo?
The second problem with reparative citizenship policies is that they are highly transactional –for states strategising about whom they seek to include and how, as well as for individuals shopping for increased mobility and life opportunities. Peter Spiro has already elaborated this argument in view of increasing acceptance of dual nationality, the investment of time and money required for any citizenship acquisition, and the benefits of an additional passport.
The British approach to citizenship reparation in two of the cases Timothy Jacob-Owens describes – the Chagossians and the Hong Kongers – provides good examples of transactionalism in citizenship reparations. The Chagossians were granted British citizenship as compensation for expulsion from their ancestral land, to which they have no right to return. This is a clear case of the quid pro quo approach, in which land is exchanged for status. Except for the involuntary nature of expulsion, the transaction ‘status-for-(lost)-land’ much resembles the controversial investor citizenship policies. In a similar vein, in 2013-2014, there was an investor citizenship route in Cyprus that compensated investors for losses of money due to a bailout levy with an EU passport. The transactional approach to Hong Kongers is even more pronounced – those who can bear the costs of settlement in the UK will enjoy the full rights of British citizenship; those who cannot will not.
The problem with the transactionalism of reparatory citizenship is that – for the state – there is always a specific intention behind these policies, which may not always correspond with the reparatory rhetoric that is used to justify it. Szabolcs Pogonyi rightly reminds us of the importance of such intention in the context of reparative citizenship for external populations. In Hungary, but also in countries such as Croatia and Bulgaria, these were used to secure votes for nationalist parties at home and influence politics abroad. Following these countries’ accessions to the EU, their respective passports became more alluring for non-EU nationals, again highlighting the transactional nature of such citizenship grants.
The same goes for individuals. In Citizenship 2.0, Yossi Harpaz discusses the instrumental nature of citizenship for individuals in countries with “second-tier citizenship” seeking to enhance their life opportunities. My friend and the applicants mentioned by Blanchard were willing to give substantive amounts of money to intermediaries to secure documents that would enable them to obtain a second passport. Few of them, if any, had recollection of or any meaningful connection to the distant relative that was wronged by a former empire half a millennium ago.
Dangerous Liaisons in Times of Geopolitical Mayhem
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of reparatory citizenship policies is that they are extremely vulnerable to weaponisation, especially those targeting populations inhabiting a ‘lost territory’. The examples of Hungary and Romania, which have already been mentioned by Owen and Bauböck, as well as by Pogonyi, could be misused to raise claims in neighbouring countries or to destabilise their nation-building projects. To play devil’s advocate, the logic of reparatory citizenship is particularly controversial in cases of “loss of parts of the state’s territory through secession”, especially if the intent behind such policies feeds into historical revisionism of authoritarian leaders. Perhaps we would be stretching the definition of reparatory citizenship proposed by Owen and Bauböck when applying it to the Russian extension of citizenship to citizens of the former USSR republics. However, the Russian political rhetoric of territorial ‘loss’ after secession of now recognised and independent states is likely to use the justification of extending citizenship as a means of ‘compensating for loss’ rather than that of historical revisionism and geopolitical expansionism.
Furthermore, the institution of citizenship, which was being hollowed out and becoming increasingly post-national until February 2022, may face a re-dutification in an increasingly geopolitical world. Military duty and compulsory conscription had been considered a ‘thing of the past’, but a number of European Union Member States seem tempted to reintroduce it as a part of ‘European preparedness’. If this trend persists, the ancient question of ‘allegiance’ is likely to resurface. Whose call to war would those holding a reparatory citizenship respond to, especially in cases where their two countries would be on opposing sides? Would they face consequences for selecting one country over another, and if so, of what kind? Could they be forcibly recruited (as is happening to Russian passport-holders throughout the former USSR lands)? Re-dutification might affect not only reparatory citizenship, but multiple citizenship more broadly, but this does not mean that I advocate for the return to singular citizenship. Yet the questions that re-dutification raises warrant reflection, especially due to the high numbers of potential beneficiaries of reparatory citizenship.
Coda: Is citizenship the just reparation for historical wrongs?
I am not sure, and – similar to Pogonyi – I would say that it depends on who is offering citizenship, to whom, and for what reason. I guess that is what Owen and Bauböck meant when concluding that citizenship as reparations “should be generally reserved for those cases where the alignment of seriousness, fittingness, and effects is best served by this policy”.
Reparatory citizenship in situ, which Sperfeldt mentions, or the Windrush case, described by Jacob-Owens, or the recognition of citizenship to the Sāmoans, discussed by Aithal, Cook, Lloydd, and Sardelić, that corrects the historical wrongdoing to a community that to this day, as a result of the said wrongdoing, remains unrecognised, marginalised or vulnerable in their place of residence, would all compensate for past injury. This is the kind of reparation that should be done, in any case, if states were truly committed to international human rights norms. Grants of passports to descendants of a community that suffered harm centuries ago by a kingdom or empire that no longer exists, or policies adopted with the goal of interfering in other states’ affairs, are far more controversial and cast doubts over whether the true intention behind the policy is, in fact, reparatory. Such grants of passports are often selective and racialised, transactional for both states and individuals, and potentially dangerous. So, I leave Owen and Bauböck with a question: under what conditions might these negative features of reparatory citizenship be counterbalanced by positive features?