I'm not going directly to take on Jon's latest post on naturalization rates. It's quite complicated, and Jon's correct that it has to take into account flows and stock. It's clear that the rate has been rising. For those interested in a detailed analysis, check out this report by Jeffrey Passel from the Pew Hispanic Center. ...
Greetings, everyone - Ken Anderson here. My thanks to Peter and all my friends at Opinio Juris for inviting me as a guest. I am actually guest-blogging next week on Opinio Juris, and am quite fascinated with this book discussion. Peter kindly invited me to join in, but I have been lobbying an editor to let me...
Peter, you argue that there is no core of American identity beyond the popular and political culture (Snoop Dogg, anyone?) that we share with the world. The culture of New York, in other words, is not meaningfully different than that of New Delhi; or in any event, it's no more distinctively and meaningfully American. I'm wondering, though: if...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
[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...
It's true, as Alex and Jon point out: the number of immigrants seeking naturalization have in effect gone through the roof. The statistics look dramatic: the volume of applications from the mid-90s onward dwarf figures from earlier decades. More than 1.3 million individuals applied for citizenship in FY 2007. That's more in one year than the...
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...
