The Politics of Citizenship in an Enlarged Europe

Abstract

The Politics of Citizenship in Europe. By Howard Marc Morje. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 256 pp. $24.99 (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-69127-7). Marc Howard's The Politics of Citizenship in Europe makes a significant contribution to the literature on comparative citizenship. By breaking down citizenship legislation into component parts and measuring these empirically, Howard provides the framework for a systematic comparison of citizenship policies across Europe and beyond. Existing works have been largely structured around the close comparison of a small number of cases (Joppke 1999; Rubio-Marin 2000). The comparison of cases has also been stymied by an overreliance on strict ethnic vs. civic dichotomies. Even the citizenship laws of France and Germany, the paradigmatic cases of jus soli and jus sanguinis analyzed by Brubaker (1992), contain both civic and ethnic elements. Moreover, some countries with restrictive citizenship policies, including Germany, have liberalized their citizenship policies over the last decade owing to domestic and international pressures. Howard's comparative framework facilitates comparisons across both space and time. The main contribution of the book is the “empirical baseline” provided by Howard's Citizenship Policy Index (CPI). The CPI measures three important components of citizenship legislation: whether citizenship is awarded by birth, the length of residency necessary to naturalize, and whether those who naturalize can hold dual citizenship. CPI scores are calculated for the EU-15—the pre-2004 members of the European Union—at two points in time: the late 1980s and 2008. This allows Howard to study the origins …