Are democratic states permitted to denationalize citizens, in particular those whom they believe pose dangers to the physical safety of others? In this article, I argue that they are not. The power to denationalize citizens—that is, to revoke citizenship—is one that many states have historically claimed for themselves, but which has largely been in disuse in the last several decades. Recent terrorist events have, however, prompted scholars and political actors to reconsider the role that denationalization can and perhaps should (...) play in democratic states, in particular with respect to its role in protecting national security and in supporting the global fight against terror more generally. In this article, my objective is to show that denationalization laws have no place in democratic states. To understand why, I propose examining the foundations of the right of citizenship, which lie, I shall argue, in the very strong interests that individuals have in security of residence. I use this formulation of the right to respond to two broad clusters of arguments: (1) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize citizens who threaten to undermine the safety of citizens in a democratic state or the ability of a democratic state to function as a democratic state, and (2) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize dual citizens because they possess citizenship status in a second country that is also able to protect their rights. (shrink)

Denaturalization and denationalization were once much more common among western democracies. From 1906 till 1968, the United States of America, France and the United Kingdom denationalized their citizens by hundreds and thousands, for fraud or illegality during the process of naturalization, for dual citizenship, or for banal default of loyalty. In a context of a ‘war against terror’ we are now seeing an apparent return to the past – with the resuming of denationalization policies and provisions. However, the (...) previous restriction imposed through courts and judicial bodies on the power to denaturalize in the USA, France and the UK, the international recognition of citizenship as the most important human right, the transformation of nationality and the acceptance of dual citizenship, and the impact and meaning of citizenship in a republic explain why, while being hotly debated and highly supported by the majority of citizens, denationalization has resumed only symbolically in the USA and France, if not in the UK. (shrink)

While many political theorists have focused on the question of whether states have a duty to grant citizenship to noncitizens, this article examines the issues associated with the state’s withdrawal of citizenship. Denationalization powers have recently emerged as a controversial political issue in a number of liberal states, making their ethical scrutiny important. I begin by considering the historical practice of banishment and how denationalization power emerged and became consolidated in the United Kingdom and the United States in (...) the first half of the twentieth century. I then discuss the nature of liberal objections to the power. My focus next shifts to the United Kingdom’s Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which attempted to create a “liberal” denationalization power. In the final section of the article, I discuss whether the Act successfully addresses liberal concerns and in so doing shed light on the possibility of reconciling liberal principles with conditional citizenship. (shrink)

Within the current debates about Euro‐constitutionalism, the conventional options are either to defend a vision of the European Union (EU) which separates global economic law from national sovereignty, and thus relies on the legitimizing powers of free markets, or to regard the legitimation problem (at least under current conditions) as beyond solution: This view argues that any further progress towards an ever closer Union would inevitably increase the legitimation deficit and that therefore the capacity for political action of the nation (...) state should be protected or restored. This paper seeks to break the stranglehold of the, as is argued, false dichotomy (global markets vs. national democracy), and it argues that an extension of democracy beyond the nation state is possible. (shrink)

The central argument developed in this essay is that today we are seeing a proliferation of normative orders where once state normativity ruled and the dominant logic was toward producing a unitary normative framing. One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is that of a movement from centripetal nation-state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages. This multiplication in turn can lead to a sort of simplification of normative structures insofar as: these assemblages are partial and (...) often highly specialized formations centered in particular utilities and purposes. The valence of these particular utilities and purposes can range from the search for justice to narrow self-interest . While this is still a minor process in the larger scale of our geopolity, it signals the beginning of a multi-sited, though partial, disruption of its existing formal architecture. This raises questions about the future of crucial frameworks through which modern societies, economies, and polities have operated: the social contract of liberal states, social democracy as we have come to understand it, modern citizenship, and the formal mechanisms that render certain claims legitimate and others illegitimate in liberal democracies. These frameworks have held together complex interdependencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and poverty, allegiance and exit.Keywords: assemblages; normative; globalization; denationalization; centripetal; centrifugal; utilities; logics; liberal state; claims. (shrink)

Several political theorists argue that states have rights to self-determination and these rights justify immigration restrictions. Call this: the self-determination argument for immigration restrictions. In this article, I develop an objection to the self-determination argument. I argue that if it is morally permissible for states to restrict immigration because they have rights to self-determination, then it can also be morally permissible for states to deport and denationalize their own citizens. We can either accept that it is permissible for states to (...) deport and denationalize their own citizens or reject the self-determination argument. To avoid this implication, we should reject the self-determination argument. That is, we should also reject the conclusion that rights to self-determination can justify any significant immigration restrictions. (shrink)

When can or should citizenship be granted to prospective members of states? When can or should states withdraw citizenship from their existing members? In recent decades, political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the first question, but have generally neglected the second. There are of course good practical reasons for prioritizing the question of when citizenship should be granted—many individuals have a strong interest in acquiring citizenship in particular political communities, while many fewer are at risk of denationalization. Still, (...) loss of membership in a political community is a practice with a long history that continues to take place today. -/- Concerns about national security have recently led several liberal democratic states to pass, strengthen or consider legislation that would empower their governments to denationalize certain persons.] At the international level, formal norms governing denationalization are vague and generally toothless, and there are no international legal norms that restrict denationalization to citizens who hold another citizenship or wish to take up citizenship elsewhere (Worster, 2009). So it is important to determine whether there are conditions under which denationalization can be morally justified and, if so, what those conditions are. We shall argue that while denationalization is ordinarily impermissible, there is a class of crime committed by citizens that may render it not only permissible, but a fitting response on the part of the state. (shrink)

This book critically investigates the notion of democracy without demos by unravelling the link that modern history has established between the concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people. This task is imposed on us by globalization. The individualization of the subject of rights is the result of the destruction of regimes of special rights of ancient societies by the centralizing action of a territorial power. This individualization, because it implies equality, has created a new form of political subjectivity (...) that has been the driving force of the democratization of democracies during the 19th and 20th centuries. Democracy and subjective rights discusses how asserting itself as the only guarantor of rights, the modern state has also nationalized citizenship. However, the author argues, the legal and judicial monopoly of the nation-state is weakened today by the multiplication and heterogeneity of the powers on which the rights of individuals depend. This situation forces us to denationalize citizenship without sacrificing, however, the specific form of political subjectivity that the individualization of rights has made possible. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion about citizenship has traditionally focused on the questions of what citizenship is, its relationship to civic virtue and political participation, and whether or not it can be meaningfully exercised at the supra-national level. In recent years, however, philosophers have turned their attention to the legal status attached to citizenship, and have questioned existing principles of citizenship allocation and withdrawal. With regard to the question of who is morally entitled to citizenship, philosophers have argued for principles of citizenship allocation (...) that go beyond birth and lineage, and have focused instead on the value of political attachment and located life plans. These principles have several advantages over existing legal principles, but they suffer from being under-specified, as well as being over and under-inclusive. With regard to loss of citizenship, philosophers have primarily denounced citizenship withdrawal as a form of punishment by appealing to principles of fair and equal treatment. However, theories purporting to show that denationalization is always wrong have trouble explaining why loss of citizenship is so problematic for persons who have committed the most horrendous crimes against their fellow citizens, and who, in so doing, have in effect self-excluded from the political community. (shrink)

The unprecedented power of China and its cultural expansion are increasing the need to examine its hegemonic impact in the field of literature. The new concept of ‘sinophone’, inspired by postcolonial criticism, reveals vigorous protests against Mainland’s centrality by advocating Chinese Diaspora literature, which has been too long relegated to a peripheral status. This study seeks to reconsider such debates through investigations of historical reasons, ideological issues, and perspectives they have widened. The sinophone literature is thus set up as a (...) creative space, denationalized as well as transnationalized. Denying both the weight of the matrix and the chimerical archipelago, it follows the poetics of relation, the intermixture, and the Open. (shrink)

Germany is joining a long list of European democracies that have modified or expressed a willingness to modify their citizenship laws to denationalize first and then prevent the return of or expel those citizens accused of having participated in terrorist activities abroad. The formal labelling of citizenship deprivation as an administrative measure outside the scope of criminal justice has prevented scholars of criminal law from undertaking a thorough scrutiny of its legitimacy. In this paper I seek to fill this gap. (...) Specifically, after demonstrating why deprivation of citizenship is a measure of a criminal nature, I argue against its legitimacy, either as a punishment or as a risk-based measure. Instead I propose that we should understand citizenship deprivation as a paradigmatic response from an illegitimate enemy criminal law. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I claim that states that choose to denationalize terrorists should do it within the framework of a process with the highest (criminal procedural) guarantees. (shrink)

When we talk about globalization, we tend to focus on its social and economic benefits. In Governance in the New Global Disorder, the political philosopher Daniel Innerarity considers its unsettling and largely unacknowledged consequences. The "opening" of different societies to new ideas, products, and forms of prosperity has introduced a persistent uncertainty, or disorder, into everyday life. Multinational corporations have weakened sovereignty. We no longer know who is in control or who is responsible. Economies can collapse without sufficient warning, and (...) the effort to rebuild can drag on for years. Piracy is everywhere. Is there any way to balance the interests of state, marketplace, and society in this new construct of power? Since national economies have become deterritorialized and political interdependencies aggravate our common vulnerabilities, Innerarity contends that there is no other solution except to move toward global governance and a denationalization of justice. Globalization tries to unify the world through technologies, the economy, and cultural products and styles, but it cannot articulate or regulate political and legal equivalents. Everyone faces the same risks to their security, food supply, health, financial stability, and environment, and these risks demand a new global politics of humanity. In her foreword, the sociologist Saskia Sassen isolates the key takeaways from Innerarity's argument and the solutions they present to growing global tensions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper presents Husserl’s concept of Europe as a postulate of phenomenological reason. I begin by showing that a certain interpretation of history is necessary in order for phenomenology to be possible as science. I then show how Husserl’s concept of Europe enables this interpretation. Working with a general definition of postulation that brings Husserl into conversation with Kant, I examine the motives and truth conditions for asserting that Europe is what Husserl claims it to be. I highlight the critical (...) import of Husserl’s concept by identifying three criteria it establishes for authentically European history: denationalization, renaissance and Europeanization. I conclude by considering the inherently controversial nature of “Europe” and outline the space for a contest of concepts that would serve the same theoretical–practical function. (shrink)

The response aims at detecting additional angles in Benhabib's problematic and adding some variables to its potential resolution. I examine two such variables. One concerns the rights-bearing subject. Benhabib addresses the tension between individual universal rights and sovereign self-determination by positing a modified Kantian `cosmopolitan federalism'. While I can support this thesis, I see a whole other reality in the making that offers additional kinds of resolutions as well as a repositioning of cosmopolitan federalism in a different field of forces. (...) Critical here is the incipient denationalizing of citizenship which is taking place inside the nation state, and hence is not predicated on post-national and transnational conditions for citizenship. Such resolutions are precluded in Benhabib's text because of the closure she projects onto the nation state. The second variable I discuss addresses precisely this question of the state today — that is to say, in a context of the ascendance of an international human rights regime and of globalization. Benhabib sees the national and the global as mutually exclusive. In my own research I see a process whereby global logics get partly constituted inside the nation state and the state apparatus itself, producing, again, an incipient denationalizing of what historically was constructed as national. This opens up possibilities for cosmopolitan federalism that Benhabib overlooks given her national—global binary. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Dohm’s _Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden_ (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews) in 1781, which argued for Jewish political equality on humanitarian grounds, more and more voices joined those demands. Prominent among them was David Friedländer, a friend and disciple of Moses Mendelssohn. One of the leading figures of the Berlin Haskalah, he worked towards establishing equal legal status for Jews in Prussia. Friedländer did not accept the given view of his times, the (...) antithesis of Jew and German. For him only the antithesis Jew–Christian existed and even that he tried to reconcile by finding common ground in a religion of reason, the groundwork of which he laid out in an Open Letter in 1799. What he proposed at that time may have been illusionary, but it certainly met with approval in enlightened Jewish circles. Friedländer therefore not only stands for those who dared to break with the traditions, but also for the generation of those who consciously aimed at the denationalization of traditional Judaism – and thus decided in favour of the confessionalization and the Germanness of the Jews. (shrink)

The founders of linguistics frequently spoke of languages as living organisms, practically autonomous, invisible and sonorous parasites of man, imposing their variations on him according to their whims or mysterious laws. Mutatis mutandis, this long out-moded point of view is finding new favor today. Our beautiful languages are truly organic constructions which render a mutually comprehensible service and assure regularized relations. We can do no more than use them well. However, as opposed to animals and societies, these organisms are immortal. (...) They can disappear, of course, through suppression or denationalization of their human support, but not through old age or disease. The corruption of a previous state is already the maturation of a successive state just as young and healthy as the other. With uninterrupted adjustments and retouchings, each generation expresses all its knowledge and all its hopes with as many nuances as its own sensitivity requires. Thus the history of a language is a never-ending embryology which passes through metamorphoses without disjunction. Italian and French do not “derive” from Latin, they are Latin in an evolved and evolving state. (shrink)

Anyone reading Yuval Shany’s response to my article, “The Blessing of Departure—Exchange of Populated Territories The Lieberman Plan as anExercise in Demographic Transformation,” would hardly characterize it as “agreement.” In part this is because Shany builds his case by assuming I am saying something about self-determination that misses—at least misplaces—my real point. This is unfortunate, both as it masks the fact that Shany and I actually agree transfers can be legal, and it distracts attention from the points of real, substantive (...) disagreement. The misreading is not an accident, rather the product of a patterned view. The points of disagreement, center on: whether transfer is a harm per se; whether the presence of a minority affects the state’s power to transfer; whether there is a positive right not to be denationalized; and whether there is a hierarchy of rights. (shrink)

By the standard of popular approval, the South African state has no legitimacy, since only whites are enfranchised and blacks are being denationalized. This institutionalized politicization of ethnicity increasingly erodes the efficiency of private and state institutions alike. Enforced ethnic identities without representative leadership undermine proposed liberal arrangements of negotiated power-sharing as well as the government policy of cooptation. In the absence of political democracy, politicized labor relations substitute for restricted mobilization elsewhere. There are three basic responses to this legitimation (...) crisis of the South African state: 1) the radical left response of revolutionary reversal of power 2) the reformist business response of co-optation and 3) the technocratic government response of further political separation with increased economic collaboration. (shrink)

This essay defends the moral permissibility, as a form of punishment, of banishment, namely the exclusion by a state of a citizen from its territory. I begin by outlining the prima facie case for banishment, consider for whom it may be appropriate, and acknowledge constraints on its permissibility. I then defend banishment against the main objections in the literature to banishment or the related measure of denationalization (stripping citizens of their citizenship): impermissible permanency; excessive severity; ineffectiveness; unfairness to those (...) who are punished and the creation of two classes of citizens; unfairness among states; and that banishment without denationalization is incompatible with the nature of citizenship. I adopt a ‘cantilever strategy’: if incarceration is permissible notwithstanding a certain objection, so is banishment. In concluding, I sympathetically discuss the view that, despite the moral permissibility of banishment, the power to banish should not be instituted because of the risk of abuse. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено 100-літньому ювілею єпископа Софрона Мудрого, професора східного канонічного права Папського Східного інституту в Римі, згодом Івано-Франківської теологічної академії та Прикарпатського національного університету імені Василя Стефаника. Вона складається з двох блоків. У першому блоці запропоновано розбір наукових праць, написаних за чверть століття починаючи з кінця 1990‑рр. представниками різних галузей вітчизняної гуманітаристики, в яких досліджуються церковна, освітянська й наукова сфери його діяльності. Огляд наукових розвідок дозволив не тільки показати масштабність цієї непересічної особи як церковного й культурного діяча, але й виявити (...) суттєву прогалину – відсутність досліджень філософських поглядів преосвященного Владики. У другому блоці вперше в науковому дискурсі запропоновано аналіз філософського виміру історичного й правознавчого доробку професора Мудрого, його історіософії, висвітлено філософсько-богословське бачення мислителем тисячолітньої історії українського християнства у фокусі таких понять як «прозелітизм» і «ціна терпіння». Автор стверджує, що філософія як світогляд формувала кожну церковну чи публічну промову Софрона Мудрого, його наукову й богословську думку та визначала ідейний і концептуальний рівень його праць і висловлювань. Як історик Церкви і як доктор канонічного права, професор Мудрий виробив філософсько-релігійне бачення історичних та юридичних проблем прозелітизму у світлі цілісного розуміння ідентичності національного й релігійного в їх нерозривності, взаємозв’язку та взаємовпливі на героїчних шляхах, позначених славою, і на трагічних манівцях історії становлення Української Церкви й української нації як єдиного історично-культурного процесу. (shrink)

Українська національна система освіти і сьогодні перебуває під тиском залишкових ідеологічних та практичних ознак колишньої радянської освіти, яка була надмірно централізованою, ідеологізованою, денаціоналізованою та мілітаризованою. Стаття присвячена аналізу проблем, пов’язаних із тим, як перелічені суперечності впливають на сучасний розвиток української освіти. Робляться висновки про необхідність уникнення проблем, які рудиментарним чином успадковані українською системою освіти від попередньої.