Reparation or Nation-branding?
Alfons Aragoneses (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona)
“Do you feel fully Spanish to be able to defend a coat of arms, a nation, a flag, an anthem?”
This question was put by a sports journalist at a press conference in Qatar, on the occasion of the 2022 World Cup, to Aymeric Laporte, a footballer of French origin, born in Agen in 1994, who became a naturalised Spanish citizen in 2021 despite having no family ties with exiled or emigrated Spaniards or Sephardic Jews. Aymeric Laporte had received his citizenship by “carta de naturaleza” through a Royal Decree that referred to “exceptional circumstances” as the reason justifying the decision. Some of the most patriotic sports journalists had been stressing for weeks the player’s lack of family links with Spain and the lack of qualification of the sportsman to defend the colours of Spain by taking the place of football players “more Spanish” than him. Aymeric Laporte could have settled the controversy by affirming his feeling of Spanishness and his love for the coat of arms, the nation, the flag and the anthem of the Spanish nation. But his response, in perfect Spanish, went in another direction:
What a question! I will try to answer. I’m here to compete at the highest level. My goal is the same as Spain’s: to win all competitions. … I’m going to give all I have to win what’s ahead of us and I think that’s something important and that no one should doubt that I’m going to give everything for this national team.
Actually, Laporte did not answer the question: he spoke neither of his feelings as a Spaniard, nor of his love for the Spanish symbols. He only referred to his commitment to the Spanish national team and, therefore, to the country that had granted him a passport, to whose victory in the World Cup he wanted to contribute.
This exchange between a journalist and a sportsman may seem banal, but it made explicit two ways of understanding nation and citizenship. On the one hand, the journalist’s doubts expressed a way of seeing the nation as a homogenous community formed by people sharing descent, cultural and sentimental ties linking them to a country. Having a passport would not be a sufficient reason to play in the national team: a bond and a feeling would be necessary. On the other hand, the government that had granted citizenship to Aymeric Laporte was betting on a concept of citizenship that would include people without historical or blood ties to the Spanish nation in the past but who could contribute positively to Spain’s prestige and success.
Perhaps we are oversimplifying, but these two conceptions of nation and citizenship are present today in legal and political debates all over the planet. The old conception of citizenship as a bond based on soil or blood still determines not only legal rules in most countries but also the conception of the nation, still perceived by many as a homogeneous community, defined by ethnic, historical and cultural ties. “Ius sanguinis” and “ius soli” refuse to disappear. Yet other ways of seeing citizenship are gaining ground that consider that people without ethnic or cultural ties to a community can be part of it if this benefits the state, whether in terms of sports, science or prestige, and if they are committed to its constitutional values. It is not so much ethnicity or history that matters, but rather the willingness to be part of a community and the will of the state to include foreigners.
Laporte’s case has nothing to do with the reasons that the 2015 Law on Sephardic citizenship of 2015 or the memory laws of 2007 and 2022 invoked for granting Spanish citizenship: a historical injustice that would justify granting citizenship to the descendants of the victims. However, there is a common issue in both cases: what David Owen and Rainer Bauböck call in their contribution to this debate, the “right to include” people in the political community. I agree with them that reparative citizenship has to do with the right to include foreigners into the nation.
Reparation is not the justification
If we analyse the 2015 Spanish law granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews, we see that at no time does it speak of reparation. The preamble of the law, which uses expressions and ideas of the old nineteenth-century “philosephardism”, speaks of “reunion” (“reencuentro”) of Spain with the Jews, of “reconciliation”, but on no occasion does it mention reparation. It speaks of the “expulsion” of the Jews in 1492, but not of injustice. What is more: it does not accuse any monarch of being responsible for that expulsion but a vague “imperative of history”. It defines Sephardim as “the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula and, in particular, their descendants, those who, after the Edicts of 1492 that compelled forced conversion or expulsion, took this drastic path”, as if those Jews had freedom of choice after the Edict of the Reyes Católicos that forced them to either convert or leave.
The law does not speak of reparation, but neither does it base the granting of citizenship solely and exclusively on the injustice of 1492. In order to obtain a Spanish passport, it is also necessary to have “special ties with Spain”, which would exclude from the application of the law Sephardic Jews with no economic, social or cultural ties with Spain. According to Lior Erez, the guiding thought here could be “that the victims of expulsion have been wrongfully excluded from the political community, and therefore, the state has no right to exclude them or their descendants for the same reason it does not have a right to exclude current members”.
Therefore, we cannot formally speak of a reparation law or reparative citizenship. In fact, it would be difficult to argue the right of the Sephardim to a legal reparation today: the proof of the damage would be impossible, but it would also be difficult to prove the responsibility of a Spanish State that in 1492 was still far from existing as a legal and political entity.
Despite all this, the symbolic weight of the law, the references to reconciliation and the way the norm has been interpreted have allowed politicians and journalists to speak in these terms. What, therefore, does the injustice of 1492 have to do with the 2015 law? Is there any reason to grant citizenship beyond the aforementioned “right to include”?
Reconceptualising the nation and citizenship
Undoubtedly, in the Spanish case, the desire to carry out a symbolic reparation played an important role. However, we must also take into account the interest in broadening the concept of citizenship and nation and include in the nation individuals who can act as agents in defence of Spain’s interests abroad. Above all, we must consider the desire to improve the country’s reputation, for centuries weighed down by the episode of the Reyes Católicos in 1492 and by anti-Semitism during the modern and contemporary ages.
Both such nation-branding and symbolic reparation, as well as the granting of citizenship to individuals due to extraordinary circumstances, lead us to the same point: the reconceptualisation of the nation and citizenship. In the 19th century, citizenship was a legal link to the state that was neutral only in appearance but served to define the nation on the basis of an ideal citizen and community. Now, in the 21st century, citizenship also serves to define the nation on the basis of values perceived as positive, be it the rejection of past injustice, commitment to democracy or a country’s prestige. It can also serve to promote the inclusion of self-perceived historically oppressed or marginalised groups.
As David Owen and Rainer Bauböck state, “one obvious problem that can arise with policies offering citizenship as reparations is that they treat similar groups differently”. In the case of the 2015 Spanish law, there has been critique of discrimination against Sephardic Jews with no ties to Spain: for example, against Sephardim who do not speak Castilian, the official language throughout the territory, although not the only one in the country. Also, the discrimination involved in offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the victims of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, but not to those of the expulsion of the Moriscos a hundred years later, has been often discussed. Nor is there any provision for granting citizenship to the inhabitants of the former province of Western Sahara, abandoned by the metropolis in 1975.
These differences in treatment do not only reinforce the idea of the use of a pseudo-reparative citizenship to improve Spain’s external reputation through nation-branding, to improve relations with Israel and with the Jewish world in general; they also show that states are far from abandoning the old criteria of descent and history when it comes to broadening the concept of nationhood.
In short, the Spanish case, and by extension also the Portuguese one and those policies of other countries that have recently adopted “reparative citizenship” laws, demonstrate that the granting of citizenship using the argument of reparation is, as Lior Erez states, “permissible, but not required”. The enlargement of the political community through overcoming the old concept of the nation may still need a compelling moral or political argument to justify the “right to include”.
Reputation-boosting and citizenship shopping
Finally, let me return to the subject of Aymeric Laporte. What happened to the player after the World Cup in Qatar, where the press conference with which we opened this text took place? Today, the French-Spanish central defender plays for Al-Nassr, a Saudi Arabian League team. In May 2025, he will have spent more than two years in that country, which will allow him to play a third year without paying taxes on his salary. Another option he has is to play for Real Madrid, benefiting from the special tax regime that elite players have in that Spanish region.
As Laporte’s example demonstrates, rebranding the nation by offering membership on the basis of extraordinary achievements can be problematic, as it allows individuals to shop for the best offers in global markets. A similar lesson may apply to efforts to boost the nation’s reputation through “reparative citizenship” that selectively targets desirable populations.