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The Democratic Roots of Expatriations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

Ben Herzog
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Extract

Patti Tamara Lenard assesses the justifications given for the right to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that this practice is inconsistent with a commitment to democratic equality. She provides three normative reasons for the mismatch between democratic principles and revocation laws: that the practice of revocation discriminates between different citizens within each state; that it provides differential penalties for the same crime; and that it does not provide transparent justification or due process for this harsh punishment. Although I too am repulsed by this practice, I do not think it is necessarily undemocratic. Moreover, such analysis overlooks one legitimate motivation behind expatriation: the aim to regulate national allegiance. The new revocation initiatives act as a powerful symbolic tool in reinforcing a world order based on sovereign nation-states.

Type
Democracies and the Power to Revoke Citizenship: Three Views
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Summer 2016 , pp. 261 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 1.

2 Ben Herzog, Revoking Citizenship: Expatriation in America from the Colonial Era to the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

3 Peter J. Spiro, Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4 Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1994); Linda Bosniak, “Denationalizing Citizenship,” in A. T. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer, eds., Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001); Paul Johnston, “The Emergence of Transnational Citizenship among Mexican Immigrants in California,” in Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices.

5 Stanley A. Renshon, The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005).

6 Peter Spiro suggests that denationalization is not only a toothless policy, but that it is anachronistic in the face of diminished conceptions of citizenship as an institution and the changed locations of allegiance. Peter J. Spiro, “Terrorist Expatriation: All Show, No Bite, No Future,” in Audrey Macklin and Rainer Bauböck, eds., The Return of Banishment: Do the New Denationalisation Policies Weaken Citizenship?, European University Institute Working Paper RSCAS 2015/14, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, February 2015.

7 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

8 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 13, emphasis in the original.

9 Vesco Paskalev, “It's Not About Their Citizenship, It's About Ours,” in Macklin and Bauböck, eds., The Return of Banishment.