Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship 93 of whether citizenship as a membership status should be prioritised or whether presence within the territory of a State was key when it came to voting – and what happens when two States with two different approaches to this interact through the movement of persons. Core to this was the debate about whether or not individuals should be able to relate in a citizen-like way with more than one State at a time. A former Australian ambassador to Rome has explained the fear: … an Australian resident, possibly with dual citizenship, could come to hold the balance of power in the Italian parliament and be tempted to use that power to induce the Italian government to intervene in issues of an Australian domestic character.49 The right to vote is often seen as a core symbol of citizenship, and stakeholdership in State governance. The Australian fear was that Italians might use their vote in Italy to effect change in Australia, the State where they had a primary stake. This would, it was feared, devalue Australia’s independence and auto nomy. In this case, we can see an important element of the concerns around plural citizenship. That is, the concern is centred around how the relationship between States could play out through individuals and vice versa. The relation ship between citizenships and noncitizenships and what this means for the rela tionships between States has arisen several times in this book (consider for example the differential experiences of irregular immigrants discussed in Chap ters 3 and 4). In this Australian/Italian case of plural citizenship and voting, we can see particularly clearly the perceived threat in an individual’s symbolic rela tionships with more than one State, in terms of the challenge this poses to the States involved. It involves the intertwining of citizenships, but also the activa tion of noncitizenships as a result. Unhyphenated noncitizenship, then, also provides a way in which to talk about what happens when the relationships between States play out through individuals. When the individual-State relation ships in this context can only be described in one dimension – in terms of grada tions or versions of one citizenship – something important in the nature of the relationship is not only lost but becomes challenging to the theoretical and polit ical framework as a whole. Some sociologists suggest that transnational migrants should be seen as able to be participants in both societies at the same time.50 Seen in this way, we can understand individuals as functioning as citizens in more than one place, but we 49 Bruno Mascitelli and Simone Battison (2009) ‘Challenging the Australian Government Approach Towards Expatriate Voting: The Case of Italy’, pp. 513–519 in Australian Journal of Political Science 44(3) at p. 515. 50 For example, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1995) ‘From Immig rant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, pp. 48–63 in Anthropological Quar terly 68(1); Aihwa Ong (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke University Press.