REVIEW
Emigration is a Reasonable Condition for Renouncing Membership in a Birthright Community
Rainer Bauböck (Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna and EUI, Florence)
Lior Erez’s article is a showcase of political theory at its best. It exhibits the virtues of analytical clarity, presents a precisely stated proposition with far-reaching implications for understanding a core institution of democratic states, and carefully considers objections.
Erez discusses a puzzle that had bothered me already more than thirty years ago (Bauböck 1994, ch. 4). I argued then that the option of voluntary renunciation is essential for a liberal conception of citizenship based on consent, but that allowing exit from citizenship for residents in the territory could fatally undermine the integrity and cohesion of the political community. I still have the intuition that my conclusion then was right, but I am no longer sure my arguments were sufficient. Erez’s careful dissection of the problem has convinced me that the case against voluntary renunciation of citizenship by citizens residing in the state’s territory needs to be restated.
I will start with two empirical points, since I generally believe that political theorists writing about political institutions and behaviour in the real world ought to take into account the available empirical knowledge. Do liberal democracies generally only allow non-residents to renounce their citizenship? And is renunciation of citizenship by residents generally an act that expresses political dissent? My third question is empirically grounded but raises normative questions: How does voluntary renunciation by residents affect the integrity of citizenship regimes if their primary rule is automatic birthright acquisition? My conclusion is different from Erez’s but not diametrically opposed. Residential self-expatriation is surprisingly widely accepted in liberal democracies, and allowing for it is normatively permissible. I just think that it is not a moral right of individuals and is currently an imprudent policy in liberal democracies.
Do most liberal states have a non-residence condition for citizenship renunciation?
In footnote 1, Erez claims that “among states that formally allow for renunciation, most (but not all) require either actual or expected foreign residence.” In my 1994 book, I had also assumed so. New data that have become available since then suggest that this assumption may be wrong. The GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset v3.1 (mode of loss of citizenship, L01) shows that only around 25 states (13 percent of all states) make residence abroad an actual condition of voluntary renunciation, while a further 15 (8 percent) give non-residence some legal weight without making it a strict requirement. Whereas possession of another citizenship is a condition in most legislations, emigration or residence abroad is not.
A few caveats have to be added when interpreting these preliminary empirical results. It is certainly possible that in many cases where non-residence does not show up as a condition, renunciation depends on a discretionary decision of releasing a person from her citizenship, and those who reside in the territory might then often be denied such a request. However, Erez’s argument is about a right to renunciation, and that narrows down the relevant number of cases. Such a right must be institutionalised as an individual legal entitlement. Laws that spell out entitlements need to state the conditions explicitly rather than leaving them to administrative discretion. If liberal democracies generally conceive of renunciation as an entitlement, we ought to find a non-residence condition much more frequently than the initial data analysis suggests.
More empirical analysis will be needed to filter out liberal democratic countries and the categories of citizens that are allowed to renounce their citizenship while staying in the country. Does anybody who possesses another citizenship have that right? Or does this depend on the modes by which they have acquired the citizenship they want to renounce and the one they will retain (at birth, through marriage or discretionary naturalisation)? States that limit the residential renunciation option to certain categories would clearly fail to meet Erez’s liberal standard that renunciation ought to be regarded as an expressive act of dissent that must be available to all citizens.
In any case, a first cut at statistics seems to show that many democratic states are surprisingly open to such practices. This does not yet entail that my normative critique is wrong. Current citizenship laws have many serious flaws and inconsistencies, and tolerance for residential expatriation may be one of these. And although the empirical evidence seems to strengthen Erez’s argument, it does not yet show that existing legislation is motivated by what he considers the right reason: a strengthening of consent in democratic membership through allowing for low-cost exit as an expression of dissent.
When is Renunciation an Expressive Act of Dissent?
For this crucial aspect of Erez’s argument, it is not enough to examine legal modes and conditions of renunciation – we also need some evidence, or at least empirically plausible and testable assumptions – about individual motivations.
Why should we assume, and how could liberal democracies make sure that renunciation is such an expressive political act, rather than an instrumental choice to avoid the burdens of citizenship while benefiting from the benefits of residence? Erez considers frivolous reasons, such as losing a bet, but generally assumes that instrumental reasons will not be dominant. Since, apart from jury duty, there are hardly any remaining citizenship-based duties that those who renounce can escape, there is little reason to expect that instrumental motives may trump expressive ones.
I would be less optimistic in this regard. Consider some recent global trends. The first is an escalation of geopolitical conflicts that has prompted several states in Europe to strengthen or plan to reintroduce military conscription. A conflictual international environment may also enhance the instrumental motive of gaining support and diplomatic protection from an external country that is mostly not available to dual citizens residing in one of their two countries.
Second, one of Erez’s assumptions I shared in 1994 was that states have little leverage over their citizens residing abroad and their laws only marginally apply to them. Since then, most states have developed much stronger “diaspora policies” that harness their citizens abroad as an economic, political and cultural asset and sometimes address them as an integral part of the nation (Gamlen 2019). In such a changing international context marked by geopolitical conflicts and the political instrumentalisation of diasporas, dual citizenship may once again become a liability rather than an asset. Renunciation would then become more strongly instrumental and – if it can be achieved at low cost without emigration – also more frequent.
Third, there has been a remarkable trend of democratic states offering much wider opportunities for extraterritorial naturalisation. Some of these are designed to build global ancestry-based diasporas (Harpaz 2019), some are motivated by repairing historic wrongs (Owen and Bauböck 2026) and in other cases, naturalisation is offered to foreign investors (Dzankic 2019). These otherwise quite different policies share two features. First, they all rely on instrumental incentives for naturalisation, even if expressive ones may also play a role in ancestral and reparative schemes. Second, there is little expectation that citizens newly minted abroad will “return” and take up residence. Against this background, we should expect that new instrumental motives for renouncing the citizenship acquired at birth in one’s current country of residence will emerge and may become dominant where such an opportunity is offered.
We should not only put to empirical tests Erez’s conjecture that residential renunciation would be generally expressively motivated but ask also what attitudes are likely to be expressed in such choices. This leads me to consider a fourth, and possibly most problematic, contemporary context – the democratic backlash in liberal states around the world. The rise of right-wing populist parties and the disintegration of a public sphere in which citizens share a common knowledge of facts and debate their conflicting views of the common good conjure up an image of previously democratic societies as consisting of warring tribes engaged in an antagonistic struggle for power. The opportunity for renouncing their citizenship may be welcomed by those who believe their country is in the thrall of alien elites and who want to renounce their loyalty towards a government they do not regard as representing them. If such persons can also choose an external citizenship of a country they ideologically align with and are confident they will be readmitted to domestic citizenship if the politicians they support gain power, they may jump at the opportunity and turn themselves into resident aliens. In such a scenario, residential renunciation would indeed become primarily an expressive act of dissent. However, instead of strengthening consent to democratic government through an exit option, this option would be primarily used to undermine the legitimacy of such government.
The danger I see thus is that residential renunciation for expressive reasons will not be an act of individual dissent, but of collective politicization of membership that destroys a crucial foundation of democracy – the perception that, instead of choosing their membership individually according to their political preferences, citizens have been thrown together and must figure out how to realize their common good through democratic politics in which they have to respect each other as equal members of the political community.
Birthright Membership Makes Migration a Condition for Active Consent
“…[I]f one can choose not to accept citizenship while being a resident, why cannot one renounce citizenship while remaining a resident?” (Erez 2025:1). For Erez, this asymmetry creates an inequality between native citizens by birth and immigrants that can be resolved by making citizenship mandatory for the latter or by making it also optional for the former. He rejects the mandatory solution proposed by de Schutter and Ypi (2015) as well as John Locke’s view that only adults who have explicitly consented to the social contract can be regarded as full citizens. The solution he proposes instead is still somewhat asymmetric, since immigrants consent actively to their admission while natives only have a negative right to express their dissent through voluntary exit. But unlike the other solutions, it does accept the difference between birthright acquisition and naturalisation as normatively justified. I want to build on this intuition that Erez and I share, but show that it has more far-reaching implications than he acknowledges and ultimately allows for rejecting a moral right to renunciation by resident citizens.
Automatic acquisition of citizenship by birth – whether based on descent or birth in the territory – is not a universal feature of citizenship but is the primary rule for determining who are the citizens of independent states. Citizenship in the European Union or in the fifty federal states of the US is not based on birth but derived from being a citizen of a member state in the former case or a citizen of the federal state in the latter. Urban or local citizenship in modern democratic states is, instead, arguably derived from residence. Notice that in neither of these other types of polities is citizenship derived from individual consent. One cannot opt into the citizenship of the EU, one cannot become a citizen of California without being a US citizen, and one becomes an enfranchised citizen of Stockholm without having to apply by taking up residence there.
By contrast, modern states are constructed as polities with their own territory, independent government and a stable population. Automatic birthright and presumptively lifelong citizenship are crucial for the latter condition of a population that is stable across generations and can be represented by a government whose authority does not depend on higher (or, in the case of the EU, lower) level governments. In such a polity, instead of serving as foundations for a social contract, naturalisation and renunciation are secondary rules that provide correction mechanisms for the mismatch between a territorial population of residents and the citizenry that is inevitably generated by migration. But why are these corrections based on individual choices rather than simply imposed by turning all residents into citizens and denaturalising all who set up their primary residence abroad?
The reason is precisely that voluntary naturalisation means opting into a birthright community. It assimilates citizens by choice to those by birth. The very origin of the word to naturalise expresses the fiction that they become like natural-born citizens. This strengthens the automatic birthright compared to mandatory naturalisation that would introduce a rival principle of ius domicilii.
By contrast, voluntary renunciation means opting out of a birthright community, and this is potentially harmful for the political community, since it weakens the commitment that birthright is meant to strengthen. This harm is minimal when renunciation happens outside the territory. A genuine link principle requires anyhow that extraterritorial citizenship transmission iure sanguinis must be curtailed for subsequent generations born abroad. Letting those who live abroad renounce their citizenship speeds up the necessary shrinking of a birthright community outside the territory through an individual exit option, just as the opportunity to naturalise speeds up the absorption of an immigration society into a territorial birthright community.
This argument restores this symmetry in a different way by emphasising the conditions for entry and exit in political communities based on birthright and exposed to international migration. Instead of smuggling back in a social contract idea of political community as a voluntary association grounded in individual consent in membership for all, it acknowledges that citizenship in all territorial polities is attributed automatically, and in independent states specifically through birthright rules. The only individuals who are in a position where they can and must be allowed to choose between alternative membership statuses are those who move their residence across international borders. Membership choice applies thus specifically to migrants. Native citizen residents can make use of that option for any reason, including that of expressing political dissent, if they are ready to put themselves into the position of migrants by leaving the country.
Some political scientists and economists have worried that even that option may be detrimental for democracy. Stein Rokkan argued that lock-in effects and increasing barriers to exit were crucial conditions for building effective states in Europe with a territorial monopoly of legitimate violence. In Albert Hirschman’s theory, loyalty makes exit less attractive and thereby strengthens the likelihood that dissatisfaction will be articulated through voice. Democratic states that need to foster loyalty and voice to function well could conclude that this requires not only banning renunciation of citizenship in the territory but also making emigration less attractive.
Deriving such normative conclusions from plausible theories about how free exit can undermine democracy would certainly be problematic for liberal conceptions of democracy. Freedom of emigration is a fundamental human right that democracies must not only preserve as a negative liberty through removing restrictions but should actively facilitate through free movement arrangements for their citizens with other states. Toleration of dual citizenship and allowing for the renunciation of citizenship by non-residents are important elements of this liberal commitment to the freedom to leave. This does not and need not entail a right to renounce citizenship without leaving.
Conclusions
I have pleaded for considering changing contemporary contexts that provide new instrumental incentives for renouncing citizenship without emigration, but could also politicise this choice in a way that strengthens the backlash against democracy. I have then argued that, as a matter of principle, voluntary naturalisation and renunciation should be regarded as individual choices for international migrants only since they ultimately serve to adjust membership in territorial birthright communities to transborder movement. While the freedom to choose and renounce one’s citizenship remains a fundamental right in liberal democracies, immigration and emigration are justifiable conditions for exercising this right.
Does my initial finding that – contrary to Erez’s and my own earlier assumptions – surprisingly few countries make residence abroad an explicit condition for voluntary renunciation of citizenship undermine my normative conclusion? Not necessarily so, since this still leaves open two possible interpretations.
One is that there are enough safeguards in place against the negative effects of renunciation by residents to make the policy permissible even if it is at odds with the preservation and integrity of birthright-based political communities. Such renunciation may create self-harm for the individuals concerned who voluntarily waive rights of political participation and security of residence and return. More worryingly, it creates harm for the wider political community through promoting an option of non-territorial secession, but the extent of collective harm depends on the number who take up this offer and their particular motivations for doing so. If we rule out paternalistic objections to self-harm and qualify the objections from harm to citizens collectively in this way, the policy may be well regarded as permissible.
At the same time, if I am right about the changing contexts, it should be regarded as very imprudent. I would thus stick to advocating for a general condition of residence abroad for voluntary renunciation in those democracies that have not introduced it.
In any case, my considerations lead me to disagree with Lior Erez that renouncing one’s citizenship is a moral right that should not be conditional on leaving the country.