88 R. Bauböck tain attitudes and skills that first need to be developed?8 We may expect that children who are born and grow up in the state territory or who are raised by citizen parents will eventually want to join the political community and will also acquire the skills required for political participation. Yet these are expectations rather than certainties. Dumbrava suggests therefore that ‘we could delay the attribution of citizenship until such attitudes and skills are confirmed’. However, since children also depend on the state for their health and education, he adds that they could at least be granted provisional citizenship. The Latin American distinction between nationality acquired at birth and citizenship acquired at majority seems to approximate this idea. One reading of Dumbrava’s proposal is that this is just a terminological distinction harking back to Aristotle’s two definitions of citizenship. If we consider as citizens those who ‘give judgments and can hold office’, i.e. the members of the demos, then children are indeed only provisional citizens but will automatically become full citizens at the age of majority. The other interpretation draws, however, a line between the two statuses that can only be crossed by demonstrating the right attitude and skills. Instead of naturalising immigrants into a birthright community, this community itself would be denaturalised and reconstituted through a citizenship test imposed on all provisional native citizens. It may seem a form of poetic justice to treat natives like immigrants. Yet there is a big difference between expecting and promoting citizenship attitudes and skills and making them a requirement for access to citizenship rights. The only reason why immigrants can be expected to spend a few years as residents before becoming citizens, which gives them time to develop citizenship skills, and to apply for naturalisation, which demonstrates a civic attitude, is that they are birthright citizens of another state who have grown up there. Citizenship across generations Dumbrava concludes by suggesting that the intergenerational continuity of democratic membership should be achieved through consolidating institutions and educating citizens rather than the legal fictions and biological contingencies of birthright citizenship. One might ask why democracies need intergenerational continuity. The answer leads us back to the original justification for ius sanguinis after the French Revolution. It should not be the rulers who determine who the citizens are, nor the citizens themselves through 8 See Dumbrava, C. (2014), Nationality, Citizenship and Ethno-Cultural Belonging, Preferential Membership Policies in Europe. Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, chapter 8, 9.