NATIONAL IDENTITIES 2022, VOL. 24, NO. 5, 523–538 https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2021.2013185 The right of blood: ‘ethnically’ selective citizenship policies in Europe Szabolcs Pogonyi Nationalism Studies Program, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This paper explores citizenship policies in Europe with the aim of testing the salience of the ethnic–civic binary distinction. The paper starts with an overview of the existing typologies of citizenship regimes, with a special emphasis on the civic–ethnic dichotomy. After a brief assessment of different types of selective acquisition policies in the EU, the paper discusses the emerging normative legal framework of citizenship attribution in Europe. The paper shows that the Europeanization of citizenship acquisition norms legitimizes, if not encourages, selectivity in the case of non-resident ethnic kin populations. It is also argued that due to the ambiguous international legal coding, preferential naturalization allows ethnonationalist governments to strengthen the symbolic claims of the titular national groups over the state. But quite paradoxically, these ethnically framed policies in practice often open up the possibility of the facilitated naturalization for individuals who can hardly be considered ‘coethnics’ in the thick sociocultural sense of the word. Therefore, ethnonationalist political projects that emphasize the importance the ‘right of blood’ may lead to the naturalization of individuals who have very weak cultural or linguistic ties to their putative ‘homelands’. Thus, ethnically framed citizenship policies may water down ethnic homogeneity rather than strengthening it. Ethnic nationalism; citizenship; civic nationalism; kin-states; non-resident citizenship ‘Ethnic’ and ‘civic’ citizenship regimes in Europe As scholarly attention in the second half of the twentieth century shifted to nationalist ideology and movements, one of the first comparative tool academics used in the conceptualization of different types of nationalisms was the civic–ethnic distinction. The salience of the two types of nationalisms which goes back to Meinecke’s 1907 distinction of political and cultural nations (Meinecke, 2015) has been intensively discussed ever since nationalism became an important political issue. After the Second World War, many categorized German national socialism as an extreme variant of ethnic nationalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the resurgence of national independence movements made even more urgent the systematic analysis of different types of nationalist movements. The CONTACT Szabolcs Pogonyi pogonyi@ceu.edu This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.