2011] AN INTERNATIONAL LAW OF CITIZENSHIP 745 Resolving these liberal dilemmas is beyond the scope of this article. I am skeptical that reinforcing exclusionary citizenship practices will reinforce or resurrect strong national communities. Other forces of globalization are also tending to undermine state solidarities. Even restrictive citizenship requirements will be leaky in the sense that they imperfectly reflect social membership, especially when acceptance of dual citizenship allows for maintenance of secondary affiliations. In other words, resisting the exogenous imposition of citizenship standards may not be effective in propping up the liberal state. That possibility seems material to the normative balance. Theory aside, access to citizenship is likely to gain traction on the ground. Among advocates and decision makers in international institutions, rights of access are likely to overcome objections aimed at bolstering the state. Neither group is accustomed to defending state prerogatives in the absence of specific exigencies. To give a continuing pass to citizenship practices will seem increasingly incongruous to those operating the machinery of international human rights, especially as global mobility puts the vulnerabilities of noncitizens into greater relief. Even state actors, now fully invested in the human rights complex, are unlikely vigorously to resist the imposition of international norms on citizenship practices. States also have incentives not to raise barriers to citizenship too high, lest they lose those who add value to the national community.357 Although restrictionist political forces will continue to press for heightened citizenship barriers, they have focused more on immigration than citizenship. Although emerging citizenship norms remain provisional and could be reversed, the intellectual and institutional momentum points to an entrenching of the new international law of citizenship. At the same time, human rights proponents should be sensitized to the potential for state decay and to the effect that such decay could have on the protection of rights. Securing access to citizenship as a matter of international law may undermine state capacity. This prospect adds further incentive to advance the effective protection of rights through international and other nonstate agents. The note here is cautionary. At the same time that access to citizenship would significantly advance human rights today, it may accelerate instability and change in the global order. IV. CONCLUSION: THE DEEPENING SWATHE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW That international norms are becoming consequential to national self-definition evidences the changing nature and expanding scope of international law. In the old world, international rules relating to nationality were designed and applied to minimize friction among states; although these rules may have constrained states in their attribution of nationality, they were ultimately to the benefit of states, not individuals. That was consistent with the orienting principle of international law: the management of order among states. Individuals were no more than incidental beneficiaries of that principle, and their interests were of no direct account under international law. To the extent that states desisted from conduct that destabilized international order, international law protected state autonomy in the name of sovereignty. And at the core of sovereignty was the unfettered discretion to set the terms of membership. 357 This problem supplies an important explanation not only for the embrace of dual citizenship by sending states from the South, but also for the ethnizenship model adopted by European states in allowing citizenship to be retained by emigrants and their descendants. See JOPPKE, supra note 2; see also supra text accompanying note 324. 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