Citizenship

My wife was born in England to an American father and British mother whom met while he was stationed with the US Air Force at an RAF base, her birth duly filed with the General Register Office as with all births in England and Wales. At eighteen months, the family moved stateside - permanently - she traveling on a special passport as a dependent of a United States airman. More children and more assignments until her father's final assignment to Strategic Air Command outside of Omaha, Nebraska.

At the time of my wife's birth, dual citizenship or nationality was not recognized by the United Kingdom prior to 1983 legislation), which required she renounce one nationality. By now a bona fide American teen, she renounced the UK citizenship and remained American: she was now the lone remaining Brit in the family, her mother naturalized and subsequent siblings all US-born.

[Dual citizenship or nationality was not as clear cut in the United States prior to the State Department recognizing dual citizenship in 1990.]

Differing Interpretations

Citizenship, unfortunately, does not have a basis in international law and is instead defined country by country, evolving over time for global, political or societal reasons. Some examples:

• Birthright in the United States is currently under attack despite Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, an 1898 Supreme Court ruling, and federal law. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the constitution defines who may be elected as president, though natural born citizen remained vague until the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted.
• Previously I believed that Chinese citizenship could not be renounced. though a quick search says otherwise, though the process seems somewhat arbitrary. I cannot state that it actually occurs or is just a convenient public pronouncement of the communist government.
• After the fall of eastern European communism, Germany's Spätaussiedler allowed ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to immigrate to Germany while deny for decades citizenship to ethnic Turks born in Germany based on jus sanguinis. Dual citizenship was not legal until changes to its Nationality Law in 2024.
• Article 9 of the Indian Constitution prohibits dual citizenship but since 2004 the Overseas Citizenship of India acknowledges the large diaspora through a form of permanent residency. An Indian friend of mine has lived in the US since attending college and maintained his Indian citizenship until OIC; he has since acquired US citizenship.
• Japan's Nationality Law does not recognize dual citizenship nor birthright other than an exception for stateless parents.

So where does this leave things? An inconsistent mess that wreaks havoc for anyone moving to, working in, marrying in a country outside their current citizenship.

Ever-Changing Borders

National borders in Central Europe have been particularly fluid in the last century: wars, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the revolutions that ended communism, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Each major event resulted in adjustments in national borders.

And when border change, so does nationality. Let's look at Lviv.

Besides its gorgeous settings, Lychakiv Cemetery is testament to the rulers of Galicia over time: a tombstone's language identifies the contemporary ruler:

• German for the Hapsburg whom ruled from the Third Partition of Poland through World War I;
• Polish between world wars when Lwów was part of Poland;
• Russian as Stalin shifted Poland west after World War II and  L'vov became part of the Soviet Union;
• Ukrainian after Ukraine independence in 1991.

And to top it off, Nazi Germany occupied Lviv between 1941 and 1944. For senior citizens, Ukrainian independence marked the fifth ruling entity experienced in their lives? To whom do \residents owe their allegiance? To the current rules, whomever that may be! Nothing like a little uncertainty.

[For a deeper dive into this troubled region, read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Synder which provides a much deeper insight than I can provide.]

For the Glory of the Motherland

Countries often fast-track citizenship requests for elite athletes so they can compete internationally for their adopted country.

South Africa was excluded from all international sporting competitions due to their apartheid discrimination against non-whites. Zola Budd, an elite runner, normally would not have been able to compete in the 1984 Summer Olympics; however, based on her grandfather's British citizenship, she applied for British citizenship and received her British passport conveniently quickly. She competed at the Olympics, though is most remembered for the collision with Mary Decker. Oops.

The reasons an athlete is willing to discard their birth nationality vary: better training facilities (Lagat), sponsorship (Rybakina), Olympic glory (Gustafson). Krystsina Tsimanouskaya feared retribution if she returned to Belarus following the scandal at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, subsequently seeking asylum in Poland which granted her citizenship.

Athletes swapping nationalities is not a recent invention and has increased as the money available has increased, where now studies are measuring its impact. What is accomplished? Everyone knows which countries are importing talent, so when do we stop measuring a country's accomplishments? How is it any different that NIL in college athletics?

And really, does it make any sense that Wisconsin-born, former Iowa Hawkeye star Megan Gustafson is suddenly a Spanish citizen starting on their women's basketball team? No, it doesn't. Yet she is, for the glory of her new motherland!

Citizenship of the Dead

Researching one's ancestry is much easier with the continual digitization of historical documents: birth and death registries, baptismal records, immigration passenger manifests, government censuses, other genealogical databases. These findings become the basis when a request for citizenship is filed.

And, incredibly, citizenship can obtained posthumously, IKYN!

A ex-coworker filed for Luxembourg citizenship but only after her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother filed for and became Luxembourg citizens. The supposed blocker: her great-grandmother was (long?) deceased. Surprisingly, death is not an impediment to citizenship if the required documentation is provided. My ex-coworker made her trip to Luxembourg City and by now should have a passport for the Grand Duchy.

More importantly, a Luxembourg citizens is also a European Union citizen, allowing you to live and work in any of the 27 member states. Sosna's are Eastern European Jews, likely emigrated from Lithuania, Poland, or Russia. Though I would love to discover a path to EU citizenship, presumably most records from the Pale of Settlement were likely lost or destroyed in the tumultuous 20th century.

Government Control

Citizenship is the mechanism through which governments exerts control. To revisit the definition given at the beginning of this post:

Citizenship implies the status of freedom with accompanying responsibilities.

Essentially, freedoms are provided/allowed if you play by government's rules, if you support their ideas and goals, if you raise their image and prestige. That said, I view citizenship as the means government uses to control its populace::

• Residence: Governments may or may not allow non-citizens to reside in their country, thereby controlling the racial/ethnic/religious/whatever mix of the population; some countries control internal migration through both explicit and implicit means.
• Work: Non-citizens, even as a legal resident, are not automatically entitled to work in the country, reserving or protecting jobs for citizens. In extreme cases, naturalized citizens may be restricted from certain job categories.
• Education: Non-citizens require a visa to study in the US, which - as seen in the United States - may be arbitrarily revoked. An educational visa expires upon completion or ceasing of coursework. Some countries provide free or reduced-cost education to its citizens; European communist countries defined which citizens were allowed to study based on class, usually selecting proletariat and good communists over bourgeoisie.
• Taxation: Citizens and non-citizens working in a country are taxed on income. Citizens are often taxed on income earned overseas in addition to taxes paid to country of residence. [And what happens if you are dual-citizens working in a third country? I have no idea.]
• Military: Countries with mandatory military service require citizens, regardless of their residence, to fulfill their service requirements, though potentially deferred or canceled by the government for self-serving reasons.
• Public Assembly: Peaceful protests are usually allowed in democratic nations, but governments have mechanisms available to make assembly difficult to organize or even illegal. Occasionally, peaceful protests become too large to control, resulting in suddenly dramatic change.
• Medical: Governments control access to medical services - approved medical procedures, available medicines and vaccinations, allowable medical research - based on science (and pseudo-science) and other factors (religion, politics, ethics, culture, cost). Western governments (selfishly) withheld access to COVID vaccines from third-world, poorer nations to prioritize their populations.

By no means an all-inclusive list, but does provides examples and ways in which government are able to control and influence the behavior of its population through its definition of citizenship.

Final Thoughts

I have no doubt that chaos would ensue if the citizenship was unilaterally abolished suddenly. The EU demonstrated a potential path through its approach when implementing a pan-European citizenship that (apparently) overrides country-specific citizenship. Implementing European citizenship wasn't completely painless, yet it also didn't result in a complete breakdown of society either.

That said, citizenship has become more fluid, more difficult to define, more difficult to enforce. Even political leaders are either surprised of or do not understand the implication of their own citizenship. Governments can remove native-born citizenship when deemed "necessary". Perhaps similar to history being written by the victors, citizenship is defined (or redefined) to suit government's needs: the ability to influence and control those being governed.

Is the concept citizenship necessary? Perhaps not, but definitely justifies further analysis and study.

Image Credits

• "Group shot, Citizenship Ceremony, Hackney Town Hall, Hackney, London, UK.tif" by gruntzooki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. 
• "Lwów - Cmentarz Łyczakowski - Anioł 01" by Lestat (Jan Mehlich) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• "Bernard Lagat during 2011 World championships Athletics in Daegu" by
  Erik van Leeuwen. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts
• "Elena Rybakina & Venus Rosewater Dish 2022" by Peter Menzel is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. 
• "Megan Gustafson Aces" by John Mac is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
• "Luxembourg-5192 - Grand Ducal Palace Details" by archer10 (Dennis) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. (cropped)
• "Prime Minister Boris Johnson Leaving No.10 Downing Street" by UK Prime Minister is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. (cropped)