From conditional to secured and sovereign: The new strategic link between the citizen and the nation-state in a globalized world

Abstract

Citizenship―the legal link between the individual and the nation-state―has developed its own independent history. Prior to the American and French Revolutions, citizenship was based on allegiance to versus protection of the King, but in the nineteenth century it was transformed into a conditional status based on rights and duties. Recently, courts and governments have secured citizenship, bringing about a new stage in its development: reversing the traditional dependency of the individual on the state, they recognized that sovereignty belongs to citizens. This model was presented by the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 1950s, but originated in a movement of the whole international community which aimed to guarantee the protections of citizenship to all individuals: it reduced statelessness, securing it for 99.8% of human beings; it gave rise to multiple citizenship and, paradoxically, reinforced nation-states as the main providers of the “the right to have rights.” Far from signifying a “post-national” or “disaggregated” form of citizenship, these legal developments, in the context of globalization, consolidate and reinforce national citizenship.