74 C. Dumbrava living outside borders and thus in nurturing claims to territorial changes. Although ius sanguinis citizenship is not conceptually ‘ethnic’ (in the same sense in which ius soli citizenship is not necessarily ‘civic’), there are a number of ways in which the application of the ius sanguinis principle has been used in order to promote ethno-nationalist conceptions of membership. Firstly, the application of unconditional ius sanguinis in the context of a long history of emigration means that emigrants can pass citizenship automatically to their descendants regardless of the strength of their links with the political community. No less than twenty countries in Europe maintain such provisions.2 Whereas one can find several non-nationalist arguments for justifying emigrants’ citizenship, these weaken considerably when applied to successive generations of non-residents. Secondly, there are cases in which countries rely on the principle of descent in order to confirm or restore citizenship to certain categories of people whom they consider to be linked with through ethno-cultural ties. Apart from cases where ethnic descent is an explicit criterion of admission (e.g. in Bulgaria, Greece), there are countries where ethnicity is camouflaged in the language of legal restitution or special duties of justice (e.g. in Latvia, Romania). In this way, persons can have their citizenship status ‘restored’ on the basis of descent from ancestors who had been citizens or residents in a territory that once belonged, even if briefly, to a predecessor state with different borders. Thirdly, the combination of unconditional ius sanguinis citizenship with the reluctance to accept alternative ways of incorporating children of residents (such as ius soli) is also a strong indicator of an ethnic conception of citizenship, especially in the context of a long history of immigration. Convoluted attempts to adopt and expand ius soli provisions in Germany and Greece illustrate this point. In 2000 Germany adopted ius soli provisions3 but maintained that, unlike persons who acquire German citizenship through ius sanguinis, those who acquire citizenship via ius soli could retain 2 3 Dumbrava, C. (2015), ‘Super-Foreigners and Sub-Citizens. Mapping EthnoNational Hierarchies of Foreignness and Citizenship in Europe’, Ethnopolitics 14 (3): 296–310, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2014.994883. Hailbronner, K. & A. Farahat (2015), Country Report On Citizenship Law: Germany. Florence: EUDO Citizenship Observatory, Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies, European University Institute, available at http://cadmus. eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/34478/EUDO_CIT_2015_02-Germany. pdf?sequence=1