Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship 91 Plural and transnational citizenships [one should] as soon tolerate a man with two wives as a man with two countries. (George Bancroft, writing in a letter to Lord Palmerston in 184940 ) Historically, plural formal citizenship has often been presented as the counterpart to statelessness.41 It has been seen as a related upshot of malfunctions in the State system. This logic can be found, for example, in the League of Nations Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws 1930 which stated that ‘it is in the general interest of the international community to secure that all its members should recognise that every person should have a nationality and should have one nationality only’.42 Plural citizenship, then, like statelessness, has been seen as a problem in and of itself. It challenges the logic of the State system. To use Christian Joppke’s words, ‘dual citizenship breaks with the segmentary logic of the classic nation-state, according to which one could only belong to one state at a time’.43 As a result, plural citizens, like stateless persons, have been seen as suspi cious and subject to social moral opprobrium.44 At one extreme, and as suggested in the above quotation from George Bancroft, such individuals have been likened to those engaging in bigamy, assumed to be odious. At another extreme, they have been seen as enemy aliens and interned. The anti-binary approach presented in this book, including the acknowledgement of noncitizenship, allows a more nuanced understanding of plural citizenship (both formal and informal), and the individual-State relationships that it involves. The complexities of plural citizenship and the relevance of this to the problematic of cit izenism have been thrown into relief during recent debates in several States built on liberal democratic norms. Those debates relate to denationalisations of persons suspected of terrorism.45 If the assumption is that a person is either a full citizen 40 George Bancroft (historian, politician, US ambassador), writing in a letter to Lord Palmerston (UK politician) in 1849. George Bancroft (1849) ‘Letter to Lord Palmerson’, 26 January 1849, cited in Rey Koslowski (2003) ‘Challenges of International Cooperation in a World of Increasing Dual Nationality’, in Kay Hailbronner and David Martin (Eds) (2003) Rights and Duties of Dual Nationals: Evolution and Prospects, Kluwer Law Publishers. 41 Or the ‘antithesis’ to statelessness, see for example Tanja Brondsted Sejersen (2008) ‘“I Vow to Thee my Countries” – The Expansion of Dual Citizenship in the 21st Century’, pp. 523–549 in Inter national Migration Review 42(3) at p. 528. I presented the situation of statelessness in Chapter 4. 42 League of Nations (1930) Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of National ity Laws, League of Nations Treaty Series 179 (4137), 18 April 1930. 43 Christian Joppke (2003) ‘Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization’, pp. 429–458 in Euro pean Journal of Sociology 44, p. 441. 44 Peter Spiro explores this use of the development of social norms, for example in Peter Spiro (2010) ‘Dual Citizenship as Human Right’, pp. 111–130 in I.CONN 8(1) at p. 114. 45 Sandra Mantu (2015) Contingent Citizenship: The Law and Practice of Citizenship Deprivation in International, European and National Perspectives, Brill; Christian Joppke (2016) ‘Terror and the Loss of Citizenship’, pp. 728–748 in Citizenship Studies 20(6–7). For example, consider Audrey Macklin and Rainer Bauböck (2015) ‘The Return of Banishment: Do the New Denation alisation Policies Weaken Citizenship?’, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper No. RSCAS 2015/14; Matthew Gibney (2013) ‘Should Citizenship Be Conditional? The Ethics of Denationalization’, The Journal of Politics 75(3); Peter H. Schuck (2011) ‘Citizen Terrorist’, pp. 61–73 in Policy Review 164.