In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

14 May

One very quick point on Alex's argument (discussed by Peter in the post,"Translating citizenship outside the State") that, in effect, "citizenship will move up the territorial chain." I agree with Alex descriptively that new kinds of post-national citizenship would be established with new political entities, norms, coercive authority and the like. My problem is normative. It has not been explained...

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14 May

A quick point to Cristina. Even strong supporters of the European Union recognize that the institution has a "democracy deficit." For decades most of the power and authority of the EU has been exercised within the European Commission (EC), the bureaucracy in Brussels. Legislation is initiated by the EC, not the Parliament or the Council of Ministers which can...

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14 May

Peter suggested in a post last night that while there's been a recent resurgence in naturalization applications, we shouldn't see that as a resurgence in "the institution of citizenship" because many of those applications may have been instrumentally motivated. There are two things wrong with that, I think. First, near as I can tell, naturalization applications never weakened...

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14 May

I'd like to take up Cristina's proposition that "it is precisely the thinness of American citizenship that makes it so valuable to its members." This is an intriguing possibility but in the end I'm not sure I'm on board. The characterization is consonant with the traditional understanding of American citizenship as being an open affair, and not amounting to much...

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14 May

Alex Alenikoff and John Fonte pose contrasting challenges about where citizenship goes beyond the nation-state. Alex argues in effect that citizenship will move up the territorial chain: [W]hile it is perhaps true that the nation-state form is evolving (even declining), what is ascendant is not a set of other non-political associations; we are not witnessing the rise of world anarchy...

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14 May

I want to begin this post by addressing John’s claim that it has never happened in history that a democracy has extended beyond the nation state. On the one hand, I share his difficulty in imagining a world where the nation state is not the locus of democratic participation, because it seems to be the form of organization that best...

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14 May

[Chimene Keitner is Associate Professor at UC-Hastings College of Law and the author of The Paradoxes of Nationalism (SUNY Press 2007).] The first four chapters of Peter's thought-provoking book send a clear message: U.S. citizenship is not all it's cracked up to be. The message can at times seem harsh: "Becoming a citizen entitles one to little more than the right...

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13 May

Cristina asks this question, and she has a good point in arguing, not necessarily. I agree that community affiliation is not a zero-sum proposition and that it is possible to be a fully engaged member of more than one polity. I have argued that plural citizenship should be not merely tolerated but embraced (here, for example). Autonomy...

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13 May

Just returned from Peter's talk at the Woman's National Democratic Club. Peter gave a fine talk and it was a very enjoyable event. The questions were submitted in writing and my question wasn't asked, so I will ask it now. Is it possible to have democratic self-government without a nation-state or some other entity like a city-state, that has restrictions...

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13 May

Thanks to Jon for his richly detailed post. It's true that the last great wave of immigration, at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, witnessed some of the same phenomenon, including circular migration and the flowering of immigrant enclaves. But there are at least two developments which make the current picture a very different one. 1. ...

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