Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T06:55:08.634Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Democratic Roots of Expatriations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

Ben Herzog
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.