2020
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
2(2)
aspirationally — to all individuals regardless of legal status, 28 while rights and
obligations of citizenship vary considerably across time, space and jurisdictions.
This indeterminacy of rights and obligations relating to citizenship complicate
understanding how citizenship actually is ‘a marker of equality’ in the modern
world, 29 or of how meaningful it is to have citizenship at all.
The growing acceptance of dual citizenship, addressed in Chapter Four, reflects
the reduction of citizenship obligations over time. In this chapter, Spiro conveys
how social and political changes have loosened long-held insistence that dual
nationality was ‘a threat to morality and to the international order’, to the point of
becoming a source of state conflict. 30 As state power depends less on military
manpower, 31 as competition among nation-states becomes less zero-sum, 32 as
people increasingly marry and find livelihoods across borders, and as more
countries allow citizenship to descend through fathers and mothers, dual
citizenship has grown. 33 According to one database, just ‘25 percent of countries
continue to terminate citizenship upon naturalization in another country, down
from over 60 percent in 1960’. 34
However, dual citizenship remains contentious, with Asian and African states,
for instance, either upholding strict prohibitions or limiting restrictions under a
range of circumstances. In China, while dual citizenship is illegal, it is not wellenforced, as ‘many Chinese hold two passports’. 35 Japan has upheld a strict
prohibition on dual nationality, with persons born with mixed nationality
parentage having to choose one or the other when they turn twenty-two. 36 Well
over half of African states allow dual citizenship in limited cases. 37 These
practices reflect tensions between, on the one hand, an ongoing need to cement
national identities following ‘arbitrary colonial boundary drawing’ 38 or possibly
amidst national competition within some regions, and on the other, recognition of
economic benefits of dual nationality, such as remittances, 39 and a desire to uphold
cultural ties across borders. In practice, Spiro finds that dual citizenship has limited
negative effects on equality norms, possible exceptions being in cases where
citizens whose citizenship is ‘globally undervalued’ attain a ‘premium’
citizenship, or investor citizenship. 40
Chapter Five examines the phenomena of citizenship deprivation and
statelessness. Loss or absence of citizenship occurs in different contexts,
sometimes compelled and sometimes voluntary. Spiro recounts the twentiethcentury development of strong norms against citizenship deprivation, particularly
to avoid statelessness, which, as US Supreme Court Justice Warren articulated,
involves the ‘the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society’. 41
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ibid 63.
ibid 62.
ibid 87.
ibid 88.
ibid 98.
ibid 97.
ibid 107–8.
ibid 106.
ibid 106–7.
ibid 107.
ibid.
ibid 104.
ibid 110.
ibid 119, citing Trop v Dulles, 356 US 86, 101 (1958).
364