REVIEW

Renunciation, Emigration and the Point of Citizenship

Daniel Sharp (University of Vienna)

In “Citizenship Renunciation without Emigration,” Lior Erez argues that citizenship regimes face a dilemma. Democratic states generally accept that long-term residents may refuse to naturalise. However, they bar their citizens from renouncing their citizenship without emigrating. This is inconsistent. So, states should either make naturalisation mandatory or allow for renunciation without emigration. Erez resolves the dilemma in favour of the latter alternative. He does so on the grounds that renunciation can constitute a distinctively important expressive political act, an act that expresses that one takes one’s state or government to be illegitimate. Allowing renunciation without emigration lowers the costs associated with this mode of political dissent, and this is valuable.

In this reply, I make the case for resolving the dilemma in the opposite direction. I defend an egalitarian account of the point of citizenship. I then use this account to explain why mandatory naturalisation might be justified and show how this same argument grounds a case for prohibiting renunciation without emigration. I conclude by reconsidering how this alternative position should contend with the value of the specific form of political dissent Erez identifies.

What is Citizenship For?

Erez suggests that his dilemma stems from a deeper tension in our thinking about citizenship: “Is citizenship an individual legal status or is it a form of political office? Is it based on consent, affiliation, or subjection to authority? Does its value arise instrumentally, from the bundle of rights and privileges it secures, or intrinsically, from the status itself?” (p. 748) To answer these questions, I think, we need an account of the purpose of citizenship. Citizenship is a legal and political institution that confers upon a person a specific bundle of (ideally, equal) rights and obligations within a state. What is the point of this institution?

We can answer this question functionally by considering the various normatively important goals, ends, and purposes that citizenship as an institution serves. Citizenship is justified if it fulfils important normative functions that could not be better served by some alternative institution. Many important functions of citizenship – such as the fact that it assigns individuals whose rights require protection to states charged with protecting them or that it provides individuals with a secure entitlement to reside in a specific place – could be fulfilled by alternative rights-protecting institutions, such as a robust form of rights-protecting permanent residency. But there is at least one normative function that, I argue elsewhere, only a status like citizenship can play.

Citizenship helps to realise equality among a group of people who must live together on an ongoing basis. By awarding all permanent members of the political community an equal package of core rights, citizenship publicly manifests that all persons have an equal standing in their society. This serves as an important check against the social status hierarchies that commonly arise in bounded political communities, creating a form of public equal standing in which the state’s subjects stand as equals to one another and to which they can appeal when their status is challenged. This is the central egalitarian function of citizenship.

An Alternative Resolution

Taking citizenship’s egalitarian function seriously has important implications for how we should think about naturalisation policy. Specifically, it entails that naturalisation should not only be unconditional, but also that it should be automatic and perhaps even mandatory. A community of social equals is something we have reason to preserve. But allowing immigrants to opt out of naturalisation is, in effect, to deny them the protection of their equal status that citizenship affords. This impairs the ability of citizenship to serve its distinctive function. In a society of equals, everyone should have the same equal public status. But in a society with a substantial number of permanent residents who do not naturalise, there is no such single status that all members share. Allowing permanent settlement without naturalisation thus allows immigrants to opt out of equality. It creates, in effect, a society in which there are two status groups – one, citizens, are privileged with regard to rights and status; the other, immigrants, are disadvantaged in these respects.

Granted, in contrast to policies that bar immigrants from naturalisation, the social hierarchy that arises in this case stems from people’s voluntary choices. We should thus acknowledge that, as long as the option to naturalise remains open, the inequality is made more tolerable. Nevertheless, this unequal outcome should give us pause. Moreover, although many immigrants elect not to naturalise due to barriers to naturalisation put in place by host states, immigrants may also have legitimate reasons for opting not to naturalise. Citizenship comes with burdens. More importantly, valuing immigrants’ autonomy provides us with a reason to make naturalisation mandatory. But these countervailing reasons are, I believe, not decisive.

On the one hand, equality sometimes trumps autonomy. Preserving equality sometimes requires constraining people’s autonomy. This is a familiar point in social policy. Allowing maximally free choice can undermine equality over time. On the other hand, states should sometimes be paternalistic. For many immigrants, not naturalising may be bad for them in the long term. There are benefits to naturalising. These benefits usually – though not always – outweigh the burdens. These include not only equality and various material benefits, but also benefits to their autonomy. Specifically, naturalisation better secures immigrants’ rights against deportation – a crucial autonomy protection. In addition, naturalisation in democracies usually comes with voting rights. While some states permit non-citizen residents of certain kinds to vote in local elections and some states restrict citizens living abroad from voting, as a rule, resident citizens are allowed to vote at all electoral levels, while resident immigrants are generally not. These rights provide citizens with an opportunity to exercise their autonomy that permanent residents lack. So, valuing immigrants’ autonomy appropriately over time may mean adopting the paternalistic policy of mandatory naturalisation.

Regardless of whether one ultimately agrees with this argument, it helps to more fully bring out one source of the dilemma that Erez identifies. The dilemma stems from a tension between the two chief liberal values, autonomy and equality. Erez – in effect – resolves the tension in favour of autonomy. While this is a reasonable approach, it is not the only justifiable resolution. One can also resolve the dilemma in favour of equality.

We can do so by recognising that the basic reasoning that supports mandatory naturalisation on egalitarian grounds also explains why citizenship renunciation without emigration is problematic. Those who renounce their citizenship renounce the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship. They abandon, moreover, the most significant marker of their equal status. Because they remain in the state, like immigrants who opt not to naturalise, they do so as second-class residents, rather than full social equals. The same is not true of renouncers who do emigrate. Please, they no longer live in a polity; they escape domestic social hierarchies altogether. Hence, those who renounce citizenship but do not immigrate must live as social unequals.

Of course, in contrast to those involuntarily deprived of their nationality or those who are not eligible to naturalise, this inequality is the result of significant decisions that result from their voluntary choices. However, this does not necessarily mean we should tolerate this inequality. A society of equals is a social good that can only be fully achieved if all persons who live together on an ongoing basis share the same basic legal and social status. Allowing people to opt out of this status, therefore, undermines this good. Moreover, as in the case above, citizenship renunciation poses a significant risk to one’s future political autonomy, as renouncers (usually) lose their voting rights. So, there are autonomy reasons – paternalistic ones at least – to constrain renunciation without naturalisation as well. Thus, just as immigrants may be genuinely compelled to naturalise in order to preserve the possibility of a society of equals, so too may citizenship renunciation without emigration undermine this seemingly egalitarian promise.

I have argued that the same line of reasoning that supports mandatory naturalisation explains why states should prohibit citizenship renunciation without emigration. Renouncing one’s citizenship means renouncing a status designed to protect one’s equal standing in society. Doing so threatens to undermine one’s social equality and contravenes the ideal of a society of equals in just the same way that not naturalising does.

Countervailing Reasons

However, as Erez notes, there are powerful reasons that speak in favour of allowing this form of renunciation. Renouncing citizenship can be a way of expressing dissent – a form of “conscientious disobedience” – when done publicly in response to significant injustice. Israelis renouncing their citizenship over the oppression and genocide of Palestinians and Russians renouncing citizenship over the war in Ukraine provide powerful evidence for this claim. Protecting the right to renounce without the right to emigrate, in essence, lowers the cost for people to exercise this form of dissent, and lowering the cost of valuable forms of dissent is worth doing.

I agree with Erez that citizenship renunciation without emigration can be a valuable way of expressing dissent. But what, exactly, is valuable about it? And why should this form of dissent be legally protected? There are two ways to understand the value of citizenship renunciation. One is instrumental. This form of dissent is a pathway to challenge injustice. Challenging injustice is an important step towards overcoming injustice. Thus, the reason to protect the right to renounce without emigration is to open a pathway to challenge injustice. But if this is Erez’s point, then it does not support the claim that the right to renounce should be protected. The right to renounce without emigrating far outstrips the cases in which one renounces to protest injustice. Erez wants to argue that renunciation should not only be permitted if it is driven by “justified political reasons” (p. 754) but should be tolerated more generally.

So, to justify a right to citizenship renunciation without emigration, an alternative argument is needed. Erez’s own argument is this: “Since the act of citizenship renunciation is expressive, noncoercive, and imposes minimal external costs on others…there are few reasons to restrict its legal permissibility to instances where an overriding moral justification exists” (p. 754). To support this conviction, Erez needs to say something more about the benefits of allowing people to renounce their citizenship for bad reasons as well as for purely instrumental reasons that have little to do with protesting genuine injustice.

Erez notes his argument parallels in certain ways the case for a right to civil disobedience. However, he does not draw on the strongest argument in favour of such a right. This comes from philosopher Kimberlee Brownlee. Brownlee considers and defends a version of the view that (and here I paraphrase her much more complex position) the right to civil disobedience is supported by considerations of autonomy. Specifically, protecting a right to disobedience protects people’s ability to act from their sincere moral convictions. Analogously, the opportunity to renounce without emigrating gives the dissenting subject a less costly option for acting on their convictions. This furthers their opportunity to exercise their autonomous agency. Accordingly, one might conclude that there should be a right to renounce without emigrating.

However, although this view provides the strongest case for such a broad right to renounce, Brownlee’s own argument indicates two ways in which this defence is limited. First, this autonomy-based reasoning only supports a right to renounce based on one’s sincere moral convictions. It does not support a general right to renounce. Second, Brownlee thinks her argument supports a moral right to civil disobedience, not necessarily a legal one (though she does claim it supports an “excuse,” the kind of thing that might justify giving a defendant a lighter sentence). For our purposes, Brownlee’s second point is more important. It is one thing to claim that there is a moral right to renounce one’s citizenship without emigrating; it is quite another to claim that one’s right to do so should be legally protected. Even if people have an interest in being able to act from conviction to contest the legitimacy of the state or to protest injustice by citizenship renunciation, this does mean the state should protect that right.

Now, in the case of citizenship without renunciation, these two questions largely collapse because the question of who can renounce their citizenship is determined by what the state’s laws permit. However, the moral case for the value of legitimate dissent via renunciation without emigration does not strike me as strong enough to ground a corresponding legal right to renounce one’s citizenship without emigrating. Specifically, protecting the right opens real worries that people will renounce their citizenship for inadequate, absurd, or unjust reasons. Overall, this may lead to bad consequences. Moreover, protecting the right to renounce without emigrating allows people to opt out of citizenship. This allows them to forgo a range of obligations (from conscription to jury duty to mandatory voting in some jurisdictions) as well as the protections that citizenship affords them. Protecting a general right to renounce means people can renounce for all sorts of reasons – including bad ones. And I do not see why people’s interest in a specific form of political dissent outweighs these other interests.

Legitimate dissent for the right moral reasons is not the norm. What is more common, I conjecture, is that people will renounce their citizenship strategically, for reasons they take to be in their own interest. However, people often get their interests quite wrong, and so there is reason to be wary about protecting such a broad right. (Presumably, these considerations support the idea that the state should allow people who exercise this right to re-naturalise later). This would reduce the cost of such mistakes – but it would also reduce the symbolic value of this form of dissent.

At the very least, I think, Erez should grant that paternalism is sometimes necessary. Erez mentions – but does not resolve – the issue of whether people can make themselves voluntarily stateless when exercising their right to renunciation. I am sceptical that allowing people to do this is, on balance, desirable, at least in the absence of a better way of ensuring that people who become stateless have real and meaningful access to a new citizenship of sufficient quality. Statelessness is an extremely precarious position, one that it is worth protecting people from, even if they have legitimate reasons to renounce their citizenship in protest of injustice. I believe that the same thing might be true of citizenship renunciation without emigration generally, given the cost to social equality and to the individual renouncer’s autonomy.

A different way to support this point is to consider the costs of ruling out renunciation without emigration. In essence, the primary cost is that people cannot engage in a valuable form of political dissent without incurring the costs associated with emigration. I grant that this form of dissent can be valuable; I would laud those who would seek to use it to protest genuine injustice. But there are many other ways that people can contest the legitimacy of their states without renouncing their citizenship. These include the standard forms of civil and uncivil disobedience. Granted, not all of these ways will have the same distinctive symbolic force as renouncing one’s citizenship. However, I assume that some – e.g., burning one’s passport or draft card at a public protest – might come rather close. So, I fail to see why this specific opportunity for dissent must be protected legally, given the costs of allowing people to renounce their citizenship in this way.

Conclusion

I have made the case for an alternative resolution to Erez’s dilemma. I think the argument for this alternative is worth taking seriously. But I am not fully convinced that my position is correct either. Indeed, I am not convinced that either way of resolving the dilemma is entirely satisfactory. Both possible resolutions strike me as involving significant costs, and there may be reasonable disagreement about how to balance these costs. This speaks to the depth of the dilemma Erez has identified.