2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) country. The document enshrines an ethnic vision of the ‘we the people’ concept because it is not the people in a constitutionalist sense but those belonging to the ‘Hungarian nation’ who are the sovereigns. 17 CITIZENSHIP The way people are ‘composed’ determines the content and scope of citizenship. People are born into a particular group, but that does not mean that they identify automatically with that group. People can choose their identities, but they are rarely in a position to choose the state they want to belong to. Citizenship is a legal concept and, as Shaw put it, ‘it is for each state — according to its sole discretion — to determine issues of legal membership within that state’. 18 I share Shaw’s opinion that this ‘Westphalian’ system, whereby states allocate membership, is not going to collapse anytime soon. 19 International law requires that a citizen should have an ‘effective link’ to her state 20 and refers to citizenship as a legal bond between a person and a state that does not indicate the person’s ethnic origin. 21 Certainly, that does not mean that states cannot take into account ethnic origin when designing their citizenship politics and differentiating between applicants who seek to acquire citizenship. And indeed, when ‘granting’ citizenship, most states employ some form of cultural affinity-based criteria, 22 which often relates to ethnic identity. However, whether considering ethnicity is default or exception in a country’s citizenship politics is a decisive factor. In constitutional democracies, applying preferential rules for those with a certain cultural affinity towards the country is just one element in the toolkit of citizenship politics, and such preferences are often coupled with other requirements; taking up residency and passing naturalisation tests, among others. For ethnonational populists, however, ethnicity is a determining factor, and non-residential ethnic citizenship is a constitutive element in their citizenship politics. They deploy it to reemphasise a form of national sovereignty of the closed and Westphalian kind and to apply national (constitutional) law beyond state borders. Act XLIV of 2010, as it amends Act LV of 1993 on Hungarian Citizenship illustrates this point remarkably well. In 2010, the very first move of the Orbán government was to facilitate naturalisation. 23 The regulation they introduced offers citizenship to those whose Hungarian origin is probable or who are descendants of a Hungarian citizen provided that they prove their knowledge of the Hungarian language. These persons are fully exempted from the condition of residency. The applicants can be naturalised without having any effective link to 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Zsolt Körtvélyesi, ‘Nation, Nationality, and National Identity: Uses, Misuses, and the Hungarian Case of External Ethnic Citizenship’ (2020) 33(3) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 771, 777. Shaw (n 1) 13 (emphasis in original). ibid 14. Nottebohm Case (Liechtenstein v Guatemala) (Second Phase) (Judgment) [1955] ICJ Rep 4, 24. European Convention on Nationality, opened for signature 6 November 1997, ETS 166 (entered into force 1 March 2000) art 2(a) (‘ECN’). Szabolcs Pogonyi, Mária Kovács and Zsolt Körtvélyesi, The Politics of External Kin-State Citizenship in East Central Europe (Report, RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-Comp 2010/6, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUDO Citizenship Observatory 2010). Act LV of 1993 on Hungarian Citizenship, art 4(3) (Hungary), as amended by Act XLIV of 2010, art 2(2) (Hungary). 392