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Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship
with sole allegiance or is not a citizen at all then these developments make sense.
And yet individuals’ lives are more complex than this. This will become particu
larly clear below, in the discussion of nomadism. However, first let us examine
some core areas of contention that have been raised in the context of plural cit
izenship. Major arguments against plural citizenship include the question of how
and whether a person could satisfy or fulfil her/is duties with regard to each of
the States with which s/he holds citizenship.46 This is particularly clear in the
cases of military service and voting, and so I will pick up on these here.
It is important to note that historically, the belief that a person has another
allegiance beyond a particular formal citizenship is not dependent only upon that
person being a formal citizen of another State. This is particularly tragically clear
in the case of those US citizens of Japanese descent who did not need to be
formal Japanese citizens in order to be assumed to have some allegiance with
Japan and so to be interned. Their ethnic heritage was considered sufficient to
generate a fear that they would side with Japan against the US in the Second
World War. The apparently crisp legalistic notion of plural citizenship, then, was
(as in the cases of other citizen noncitizens above) conflated with ethnic identifi
cations of membership. As a result, Ben Herzog notes that ‘5,589 American
citizens of Japanese descent were forced to renounce their citizenship.’47 This is
related to Henio Hoyo’s naturalised citizens in the South American countries
discussed above, where full citizenship was not only about legal and formal
citizenship, but also about birth and blood.
Distrust of plural citizenship, then, is not only about concerns relating to the
shared allegiance of formal citizens. It is also tied up with assumptions about
birth, blood, ethnicity and race. As such, as Shachar has also pointed out, birth
right citizenship, however it is construed (whether by birth to citizen parents or
by birth upon a particular territory) can also be a proxy for other distinctions that
are difficult to align with liberal democratic principles. The analytic tool of ‘non
citizenship’ can help us to interrogate this.
Let us consider what this means for voting. The loyalties of plural citizens
came under the spotlight in Australia in 2000 when there was concern about
Italian citizens living in Australia voting in Italian elections. Italy had introduced
new rules allowing postal votes and creating expatriate constituencies in the
Italian parliament (these persons may or may not have also held Australian
citizenship).48 The public debate in Australia at the time uncovered a wider issue
46 For example, see Tanja Brondsted Sejersen (2008) ‘ “I Vow to Thee My Countries” – The Expan
sion of Dual Citizenship in the 21st Century’, pp. 523–549 in International Migration Review
42(3) at p. 526.
47 Ben Herzog (2015) Revoking Citizenship: Expatriation in America from the Colonial Era to the
War on Terror, New York University Press, p. 95.
48 In 2001, the Italian Parliament created four overseas constituencies: Europe; South America,
North and Central America; Africa, Asia and Oceania; and Antarctica. Arguably, the overseas
electorate was key in electing Berlusconi in the 2006 election, in which 1 million expatriate
Italians voted (Dauvergne 2008, p. 133). Catherine Dauvergne (2007) ‘Citizenship with a
Vengeance’, pp. 489–508 in Theoretical Inquiries in Law 2(6).
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