94 Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship can also understand them as functioning as noncitizens too – a noncitizenship which, if recognised, need not be so challenging to the States involved. Charac terising the situation in this way can also help us to see the complexity of the ways in which people live out their lives. Crucially, as Takeyaki Tsuda has argued, it shows how ‘we need to explore the dynamic relationship between immigrants’ incorporation in the receiving country and their transborder engage ment with the sending country as one coherent transnational social process.’51 In this book, the suggestion is that the complex and changing interrelationships of an individual with more than one State need to be considered and that this could be facilitated by the analytical tool of noncitizenship. Military service provides a differently symbolic case in which the relation ships between States play out through individuals, and one which further prob lematises the notion of allegiance and the idea that it can be shared. As in the case of overseas voting, it is particularly useful to look at a context in which this has come to a head. Patrick Weil describes how, in 1982, the first contingent of young men with citizenship of both France and Algeria reached the age of military service.52 Both countries are described as having an obligatory draft at the time. Weil reports that this gave rise to a campaign for those individuals’ release from French citizenship by the Algerian consulate, describing them as ‘Frenchmen in spite of themselves’.53 This case differs in structure from that of the US citizens assumed to have allegiance to Japan discussed above for a number of reasons relevant here. First, as a result of colonisation and then decolonisation, the individuals involved were defined as citizens-by-birth on the territory of both the French and the Algerian States simultaneously.54 Second, it was also politically expedient for both France and Algeria to claim them as citizens – and to do so uniquely. According to Weil, many individuals applied to be ‘released’ from French cit izenship (758 in 1983; 2,949 in 1984; 1,034 in 1985; 872 in 1986), and for the most part the requests were rejected (72 per cent, 85 per cent, 71 per cent and 44 per cent respectively).55 He reports that at some point during this debate, Alge rian discourse changed, recognising the Algerian population in France as likely to stay there after all, but seeing them as strategically useful in a new way, 51 Takeyaki Tsuda (2012) ‘Whatever Happened to Simultaneity? Transnational Migration Theory and Dual Engagement in Sending and Receiving Countries’, pp. 631–649 in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38(4) p. 634. 52 By double application of jus soli they were both in France, and born to a parent born in pre-independence Algeria – considered to be French soil – Article 23 of Nationality Code. Patrick Weil (2008) How to Be French: Nationality in the Making Since 1789, Duke University Press, translated by Catherine Porter, p. 155. 53 Weil 2008 ibid. p. 155. 54 Olivier Vonk (2012) Dual Nationality in the European Union: A Study on Changing Norms in Public and Private International Law and in the Municipal Laws of Four EU Member States, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, p. 198. 55 Weil 2008 ibid. p. 155 n. 7.