REVIEW

Where Renunciation Leads

Jules Lepoutre (Université Côte d’Azur)

More than a decade ago, Audrey Macklin (2015) coined the expression “sticky citizenship”. Whereas citizenship may prove difficult to obtain and increasingly easy for states to withdraw, it may also be imposed upon an unwilling recipient or resist the efforts of an individual who wishes to disavow it. Macklin concluded that these apparently exceptional cases mattered because they revealed the opportunistic uses that states themselves make of citizenship, the possible divergence between individual and state interests, and the unresolved relationship between ascription and agency in political membership. It is precisely this question of agency in political belonging that Erez takes up: if initial membership is largely ascriptive, how far should individual choice govern its continuation, and can one cease to belong politically without ceasing to belong socially or territorially?

Macklin was herself alert to the possibility that the empirical significance of this inquiry might appear slight. In a world where millions experience the hazards of “slippery” citizenship, the predicaments associated with its stickiness could be dismissed as mere variations on “man-bites-dog” stories: striking precisely because they reverse the ordinary direction of vulnerability. Erez gives new substance to this apparently marginal inquiry. The importance of his argument need not depend on how many citizens would actually seek to renounce without emigrating; the possibility operates as a stress test for liberal theories of membership, exposing the tension between citizenship by ascription and continued membership without consent. His article can thus be read as developing Macklin’s concept into a sustained theory of renunciation as expressive political resistance. The parallel with Macklin is therefore worth noting: although her work was primarily concerned with refugee law and citizenship deprivation, it provides a useful additional reference point for situating the question developed here.

Lior Erez questions the connection between renunciation and emigration. Its argument begins from a seductive symmetry. If long-term foreign residents may decline to naturalise while remaining in the country, why should resident citizens not be allowed to relinquish their citizenship? Erez rejects mandatory naturalisation and accordingly argues that liberal states should recognise a right to renounce citizenship without territorial exit. Renunciation would enable individuals to distance themselves politically from the state while continuing to participate in society.

This is a stimulating argument. The distinction between territorial, social and political exit is analytically valuable, as is the attempt to carry voluntarist theories of citizenship to their logical conclusion. The article, therefore, requires a fuller account of two related problems. First, what is the democratic meaning of remaining subject to a political order while formally withdrawing from its demos? Secondly, who benefits when citizenship is reconceived as a more voluntarist, reversible and quasi-contractual form of membership? Once these questions are brought to the fore, renunciation without emigration could appear less as a liberal enlargement of individual choice than as a possible mechanism of democratic self-exclusion, inequality among citizens and state empowerment.

The Democratic Costs of Renunciation

The first difficulty concerns the relationship between exit and democratic dissent. In Hirschman’s classic account, exit and voice are alternative responses to dissatisfaction, but exit may weaken voice by removing those most disposed to contest an institution from within. Erez follows Kirkpatrick in arguing that exit can itself become expressive resistance. This is plausible when departure is publicly staged or when political disaffiliation exposes the costs of a government’s actions. Renunciation without emigration is different, however. The individual remains subject to the law, continues to contribute economically and socially, and retains most territorially grounded obligations, but relinquishes their formal equality and participation in the making of those laws.

This is democratically troubling. Democratic pluralism is not premised on citizens agreeing with the state, still less on their identifying with each of its policies. It is premised on institutionalising disagreement among political equals. Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism is useful here: democracy turns opponents into adversaries who continue to share a political arena despite their conflicts (Mouffe 2000). Renunciation transforms the adversary into an outsider. It converts disagreement with a government, or even with a political regime, into withdrawal from the demos itself. The danger is that citizenship becomes confused with political endorsement.

Renunciation also objectively alters the structure of the relationship. In Erez’s theory, since another nationality is retained in order to prevent statelessness, the renouncer becomes linked exclusively by citizenship to the other state of citizenship, falls within that state’s personal jurisdiction and may, at least in principle, benefit from its exercise of diplomatic protection against the state of residence (and former state of citizenship). The internationalisation of an initially domestic political conflict is therefore not merely a matter of perception; it is one of the effects of the proposed act.

The significance of that transformation will, however, vary considerably according to the states involved. The article appears implicitly to envisage relations between broadly equal liberal democracies. A French-German dual national who renounced French nationality while remaining in France would retain quasi everything but national political rights, and produce, at best, a bit of agitation. Consider, by contrast, a Guatemalan-US dual national residing in Guatemala who relinquished Guatemalan nationality to retain only US citizenship. The formal act would be the same, but its political and international significance would not. It would transform a member of the Guatemalan polity into the mono-national of a much more powerful state, capable of mobilising diplomatic, economic, legal and even military pressure on their behalf. The value and effects of renunciation consequently depend not only on the possession of a second citizenship, but also on the geopolitical weight attached to it. Citizenships may be formally equal as legal statuses; the states standing behind them are not.

Erez’s theory stages not only the spectacle of renunciation vis-à-vis the state of residence, but equally a revitalisation of the individual’s bond with a state of origin. There is therefore nothing accidental about the democratic expectation that the territorial community should, as far as possible, coincide with the citizenry. Incorporating long-term residents is not exclusively an act of generosity towards immigrants; it is also an assertion of democratic self-government and territorial sovereignty against the competing jurisdictional and protective claims of foreign states.

The history of citizenship and diplomatic protection makes this point particularly clear. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Latin American states sought to impose their citizenship upon settled European and North American foreigners, partly to prevent those residents from invoking the diplomatic protection of powerful home states. Diplomatic protection was then regularly used by European states and the United States to press financial and property claims against weaker states, sometimes through military intervention and gunboat diplomacy. Latin American doctrines and practices attempted to subject foreign residents to the same legal order as citizens, to (try to) neutralise their external protection. Conversely, Western powers vigorously defended the principle that nationality could not be imposed without consent, and international fora frequently refused to recognise automatic naturalisation where it would have defeated their diplomatic claims (Erpelding 2026). The right of a resident foreigner not to acquire the nationality of the territorial state – the very premise from which Erez derives his symmetry – was therefore never solely a liberal protection of individual choice. It also preserved the jurisdiction and interventionist capacity of the foreigner’s home state.

The equality problem is even more direct. Erez does not overlook statelessness; rather, he brackets it. At the outset, he treats existing anti-statelessness constraints as a presumptive limit on renunciation and assumes, “for the sake of simplicity”, that they would continue to apply to renunciation without emigration. In his concluding remarks, he asks whether his argument should extend to mononationals wishing to renounce their sole citizenship, describes voluntary statelessness as a “difficult bullet to bite” because it revives the paternalist objection, and postpones the question to another occasion. The restriction has an intelligible protective basis. Article 7(1)(a) of the 1961 Convention requires contracting states that permit renunciation to prevent it from producing statelessness unless another nationality is possessed or acquired (1961 Convention). Yet, from a legal perspective, this condition should not be naturalised as a universal boundary of the argument. The Convention currently has only 82 parties, and it is unclear whether this restriction constitutes a special rule of customary international law (Spiro 2017).

More importantly, the question Erez postpones (whether a mononational should be allowed to cause their own statelessness) is distinct from the equality problem his assumption creates. Nowhere does the article separately consider why a right justified by reference to autonomy, democratic legitimacy and expressive resistance should be available only to citizens who happen to possess another citizenship. A second citizenship is plainly relevant to the legal consequences of renunciation; it is not obviously relevant to the autonomy or expressive interests invoked to justify the right.

The paradox of Erez’s theory is therefore that dual nationals – routinely treated as second-class citizens when, for instance, citizenship deprivation is at stake – are here recast as a privileged class when renunciation is framed as political resistance. They alone can stage an expressive act of exit, while mononationals remain bound to a membership they cannot similarly reject. A theory designed to symmetrise membership thus produces a new hierarchy among citizens.

The resulting democratic inequality between those who can and cannot perform renunciation is compounded by a further danger: normalising citizenship as a reversible status may also broaden the state’s justificatory repertoire for exclusion.

Voluntarism in the Shadow of State Power

The second problem arises not from an expressly contractual theory of citizenship, which Erez does not offer, but from the quasi-contractual implications of his voluntarism. As Abdelmalek Sayad argued, naturalisation is not a purely decisional act attributable to an autonomous individual. It is embedded in collective histories and in an unequal relationship between the person who requests membership and the state empowered to confer it (Sayad 1993). Yet the state – the party that defines the conditions of membership and determines the consequences of its loss, with strategic and institutional agency – remains curiously absent from Erez’s account. This omission matters because the grammar of will and consent has never been politically neutral: states have repeatedly instrumentalised it to attribute to subordinated subjects the responsibility for their own exclusion.

Erez does examine the role and meaning of individual will when distinguishing between citizenship loss initiated by the individual and loss initiated by the state. Yet the question extends beyond identifying the formal author of the loss. Voluntarism and its accompanying discourse may enhance individual autonomy, but they can also spill over into the justification of state power. The liberty that the state recognises in the individual may become a power that it claims for itself. Citizenship deprivation, a sovereign measure of exclusion, is accordingly sometimes recast as merely giving effect to individual will: through their conduct, citizens are said already to have repudiated allegiance and broken the social contract (Lepoutre 2020).

The state’s interest must consequently be addressed much more directly. Why would governments and legislatures create a new status for citizens who publicly reject them? A liberal state might value consent and the expressive autonomy of dissenters. But the state may have other, less generous reasons to embrace contractual membership. It may use renunciation to remove hostile voices from the electorate, to reduce its obligations towards particular individuals, or to portray resident non-citizenship as an affirmatively chosen condition. Even where the present legislature acts for liberal reasons, the legal category it creates would remain available to later governments with different (and opposite) purposes.

Giving individuals a stronger power to say no does not, therefore, operate in an institutional vacuum. It may reinforce the state’s power to deny naturalisation, to attach loyalty conditions to membership or to interpret political disaffection as evidence that a person does not belong. If citizenship is treated as the product of continuing consent, the state may also become less willing to regard it as a secure and unconditional status. The individual’s right to reject the state can be mirrored politically – even if not logically or legally – by the state’s asserted right to reject the individual.

The two powers are not identical. Recognising a voluntary right to renounce does not necessarily entail authorising involuntary deprivation, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, Erez does not address, nor explain, how voluntarism can empower the weaker party without strengthening the justificatory resources of the stronger one. He does not identify either the institutional safeguards capable of preventing a right designed for dissenters from becoming a mechanism for encouraging, pressuring or normalising their political exclusion.

Seen over the longue durée, individual will has played only a limited role in the legal construction of nationality. In France, for instance, Patrick Weil analysed citizenship as resting less on an ethnic criterion or a voluntary and contractual act than on an effective sociological connection, of which birth and residence provide legal evidence. Hence, the more securely an individual’s effective link with France is established, the less scope the law leaves them to refuse French citizenship (Weil 1997). This insight can be extended beyond the particular rules of French jus soli that Weil was primarily discussing. Citizenship law generally relies on a series of presumptions of attachment – including birth, descent and residence – through which the state identifies its members. An individual will ordinarily operate as a supplementary criterion where those presumptions leave the relationship uncertain. Erez’s proposal would alter this ordering by making will a primary determinant of membership, capable of overriding the accumulated legal and social connections between a resident citizen and the state. The gain in individual agency is real, but it may also render more fragile the presumptions through which citizenship is stabilised as an objective and enduring status.

On this view, citizenship’s relative stability may be valuable precisely because it removes political membership from this contractual exchange. Automaticity and permanence prevent the state from requiring citizens repeatedly to demonstrate allegiance, while also protecting individuals from the irreversible consequences of a political rupture. They secure not only the person’s present rights but also the rights of their future self under governments and political circumstances that cannot be anticipated. What appears paternalistic from the perspective of immediate individual choice may therefore function as a constitutional precommitment against both private miscalculation and public domination.

Defending the autonomy of those able to leave the demos without leaving the territory may be a seductive and sophisticated project in times of peace, among states of broadly comparable power and within democracies confident of their own stability. Its appeal rests, however, on benign institutional assumptions: that residence will remain secure, that foreign protection will not become a source of interstate conflict, and that the state will not translate the individual’s liberty to withdraw into a corresponding power to exclude. Once those assumptions weaken, making citizenship more optional for individuals may also help make it more conditional in the hands of the state. This is not an argument for perpetual allegiance, nor does it deny that renunciation may sometimes carry genuine political force. It is an argument for recognising permanence as one of citizenship’s liberal virtues: a form of constitutional insurance ensuring that political equality survives dissent, changes of government and shifts in the balance of power. In an age of geopolitical tension, democratic erosion and resurgent nationalism and authoritarianism, the liberal priority may lie less in enabling a few to leave the demos than in ensuring that no one can be pushed out of it.