534 S. POGONYI ambiguities, the scholarship on citizenship often assumes that the over-inclusive citizenship policies which render membership available for non-resident descendants of former citizens, by definition strengthen an ethnic conception of the nation. This can be misleading and inaccurate. One may, of course, speculate that even without contributing to the maintenance of national heritage (or even speaking the language), members of the diaspora who reclaim citizenship symbolically commit themselves to a nationalist/nationalizing project which may initiate a process of renationalization (Brubaker, 2011). But this, at least from a sociological perspective, should not be seen as the outright re-ethnicization of citizenship, even if the inclusion of diasporas and transborder kin-minorities is a project of nationalist parties. Preferential naturalization available on the basis of language knowledge, residence in a specific transborder or overseas location or descent from former citizenship is not necessarily indicative of ethnic origin (Council of Europe – ETS No. 166 – European Convention on Nationality, n.d., pt. art. 2 (a); Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies | OSCE, n.d., para. 32.). Among others, descendants of ethnic and national minorities living outside the country are also eligible for preferential naturalization if they meet all other requirements. If ‘ethnic’ membership is legally codified as descent from former citizens, then preferential treatment is offered on the basis of links to a (historical) state rather than ethnic ancestry.3 Conclusion The civic–ethnic binary opposition is still widely used in comparative citizenship studies, even though its analytical utility has been questioned in the social and political sciences. In comparative citizenship studies, the civic–ethnic binary opposition is often used to distinguish inclusive/liberal and exclusive/illiberal citizenship regimes. According to this classification, in ethnic, jus sanguinis regimes citizenship is inherited, and belonging to the political community is conditional upon membership in the core ethnic group. Ethnic citizenship regimes tend to have more restrictive acquisition policies, making naturalization more complicated for individuals outside of the titular ethnic group. Strict language requirements and complicated citizenship tests are often criticized for creating ethnically restrictive acquisition policies. By contrast, civic citizenship frameworks are associated with acquisition policies that are less focused on the maintenance of putative ethnocultural homogeneity. In a more nuanced approach, the binary opposition of civic versus ethnic acquisition rules is intended to highlight the level of ethnic preferentialism pursued by a state, including the overinclusion of co-ethnics living abroad (‘external inclusion’) and the exclusion of individuals who do not belong to the titular national majority (‘internal exclusion’). This paper pointed out that despite the emerging norm of prohibiting ethnic discrimination in citizenship attribution, the current European legal framework does not rule out putatively ‘ethnic’ selectivity. On the contrary, the European norms intended to promote the de-ethnicization of citizenship through recommending internally inclusive acquisition rules in practice open up the possibility for the ethnicization of citizenship through externally overinclusive and expansionist preferential acquisition laws. The paper argued that this legal ambiguity is partly the result of the analytical vagueness of the ethnic–civic dichotomy. Unless we define ethnicity strictly as common ancestry through bloodline, there is no clear criteria of distinguishing ethnic and civic types of preferentialism in