114 F. Decimo As Luc Boltanski has noted,1 the event of birth is inextricably linked to the definition of belonging and social descent – and therefore legal, political, cultural, national, etc. descent as well. Historically, devices for legitimating the procreative event were provided by religion, ancestry, the nation-state and, in more recent times, a long-term relationship among a couple. In a scenario in which parentage and citizenship are not tightly connected from the beginning, the risk is not only that of generating stateless children but also an excess of state power. Even after World War Two, the Catholic Church in Ireland took children considered illegitimate away from their unmarried mothers. It was nationalist demographic policies, both in Europe and overseas, that shaped the reproductive choices of individuals and families during the 20th century with a view to producing children for the fatherland. We might recall these policies when interpreting some recent nationally-oriented arguments encouraging the children of immigrants to rid themselves of the burden of their cultures of origin in which their inadequately assimilated mothers and fathers remain stuck.2 With this in mind, do we really want to define children’s citizenship irrespective of their parents’? Do we really want to shift the task of determining the legitimate membership of our offspring from relationships to institutions? The considerations made thus far therefore lead me to agree with those who have argued that, as long as the system of nation-states regulates our rule of law, children’s citizenship must be linked from birth to that of their parents. At the same time, it seems to me that ius sanguinis is a legal instrument which, especially in a global context of increased geographical mobility, opens the way to policies of attributing nationality that go far beyond protecting the parent-child relationship. This point relates to Dumbrava’s observation that ius sanguinis is historically tainted that was critically addressed by Jannis Panagiotidis but has not yet been decisively refuted. As scholars have noted, ius sanguinis makes it possible to recognise a community of descendants as legitimate members of the nation regardless of its territorial limits, but that is not all. This principle has been used to grant the status of co-national to individuals dispersed not only across space but also across time, leading to the construction of virtually inexhaustible intergenerational chains.3 This principle is based on blood, identified as the 1 2 3 See Boltanski, L. (2004), La condition foetale. Paris: Gallimard. See Hungtinton, S. (2004), Who are we? New York: Simon and Schuster. See: Brubaker, R. (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.