2011] AN INTERNATIONAL LAW OF CITIZENSHIP 743 The dialectic through which mandated membership may undermine its ultimate value is reflected in a parallel track of liberal theory. Community cohesion and identity may be contingent on a group’s ability to discriminate, to demand singular membership, and to set the terms for admission and expulsion. Michael Walzer finds it difficult to contemplate the alternative. “Membership as a social good is constituted by our understanding,” he observes. “[I]ts value is fixed by our work and conversation; and then we are in charge (who else could be in charge?) of its distribution.”347 Insofar as a community loses these powers, whether to international law or otherwise, it loses the ability to police its boundaries. That is, insofar as somebody else is in charge of membership decisions, the understanding and mutual trust that makes for “communities of character” (to deploy another Walzerian formulation)348 is undermined—and with it, the special bonds that support democratic citizenship. In the past, community boundaries were sustained through immigration control, in both practice and theory, and through the political assimilation of those admitted. Liberal theory required equal status for those present, but allowed for the territorial exclusion of others, even though such exclusion was itself inherently illiberal. This approach worked, more or less, so long as immigration measures were enforced and the number of migrants (legal and not) was proportionally low. Leaving aside questions of continuing state capacity to police immigration, these numbers have grown significantly in recent years. Many states now host large populations of undocumented noncitizens349—which challenges the key liberal premise of immigration control. To the extent that immigration control has been degraded, citizenship could present a more defensible perimeter. Liberal support for integrative citizenship requirements is growing.350 To the extent that language and civics requirements are aimed at ensuring responsible political participation and civic solidarity, they are congruent with liberal conceptions of citizenship. This congruence may explain why such requirements, when reasonably applied, pass muster under emerging norms relating to access to citizenship.351 It also may explain why some liberals appear uncomfortable with the emerging prevalence of dual citizenship.352 At a more general level, the prospective threat to the state could supply a liberal argument against norms mandating access to citizenship. Could one argue, on a liberal basis, that state discretion to set citizenship requirements should remain unconstrained by international law, even when such practices would otherwise be considered discriminatory or deny citizenship to habitual residents? Any barrier to citizenship implies exclusion, which at some level is illiberal. But threats to the very project of liberalism justify illiberal responses. If mandated membership is plausibly 347 WALZER, supra note 7, at 32. Benhabib similarly frames membership rules as “an ongoing process of constitutional self-creation.” BENHABIB, supra note 7, at 177 (asserting that “admittance does not imply automatic membership” and that “[d]emocratic peoples will still have to devise rules of membership at the national, subnational, regional, and municipal levels”). 348 WALZER, supra note 7, at 62. 349 See, e.g., Demetrios G. Papademetriou, The Global Struggle with Illegal Migration: No End in Sight, MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE (Sept. 2005), at http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID⫽336. 350 See, e.g., Christian Joppke, The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy, 55 BRIT. J. SOC. 237 (2004) (describing growing liberal opposition to multicultural policies, including those implicating citizenship, in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). 351 See supra 197 and accompanying text. 352 See, e.g., David A. Martin, New Rules on Dual Citizenship for a Democratizing Globe: Between Rejection and Embrace, 14 GEO. IMMIGR. L.J. 1 (1999). This content downloaded from 82.196.111.31 on Thu, 07 Oct 2021 15:20:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms