The Advantages and Risks of Multiple Citizenship

Abstract

Following the election for the first time of a red-green federal government in September 1998, the plan to facilitate dual citizenship as a means of integrating foreign citizens who had been born in Germany and who had been living there for a long time became the subject of vehement domestic policy debate. The red-green draft legislation played a key role in the electoral victory of the CDU and FDP in Hessen in February 1999, which also led to the loss of the Social Democrat-led majority in the German Federal Assembly. Since then, Hessen has been ruled by a CDU-led government, with the CDU leading the federal government since September 2005. As a result of the loss of the red-green Federal Assembly majority, it was possible only to achieve a compromise, with the aid of the FDP, in the reform of the Citizenship Act, with validity from 1 January 2000, which makes it easier for many foreign nationals who were born in Germany to become German citizens, and which permits multiple citizenship in around half of all cases.

Unrest among immigrants in France in the autumn of 2005 and before that on repeated occasions in Britain, Italy and the Netherlands prompted questions at the time, and repeatedly afterwards, relating to the immigration of individuals of different ethnicity and their naturalisation, while the immigration and integration of ethnically related groups usually runs smoothly. Throughout all these years, it has remained contentious whether naturalisation should occur at the end of a longer process of social and political integration, as a “reward” for what is essentially a smooth adaptation to the existing society, or whether it should be granted at an early stage following immigration in order to facilitate the desired integration process. Here, a differentiation should be made between the naturalisation of EU citizens in the nation state and that of people from third states or non-EU foreign nationals.

Multiple citizenship is inevitably a result both of increased transnational mobility and equality between men and women, and above all of different citizenship laws in the different countries. While some countries regard multiple citizenship as being an important step towards European and world citizenship, in the eyes of others, it undermines the sovereignty of the people and public spirit among state citizens, and could lead to destabilisation of the democratic order.

A well thought-through immigration and naturalisation policy, which has the capability of winning a majority and which has been agreed at nation state and European level should attempt to strengthen public spirit among people for a country of their preferred citizenship on the one hand, while on the other, to lower some barriers, which for the most part have been too high to date, to voluntarily changing citizenship.