Citizenship by Peter J. Spiro

Author:Peter J. Spiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Dual Citizenship

Why did states once abhor dual nationality?

Dual nationality was once considered a threat to morality and to the international order. As the American diplomat George Bancroft remarked in 1849, states should “as soon tolerate a man with two wives as a man with two countries; as soon bear with polygamy as that state of double allegiance which common sense so repudiates that it has not even coined a word to express it.” US attorney general Jeremiah Black pronounced that “[n]o government would allow one of its subjects to divide its allegiance between it and another sovereign, for they all know that no man can serve two masters.” Theodore Roosevelt later called it a “self-evident absurdity.”

In early modernity, dual nationality was framed as an offense to nature, a contradiction to the great chain of being that was thought to order the universe from God to sovereign to subject. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was still reflexively rejected, with bigamy supplying the standard analogy. But behind the social opprobrium associated with the status—which no one rose to defend as legitimate—there lurked much more concrete dangers. States engaged in turf contests over dual nationals that translated into serious bilateral conflict.

European states were loath to concede the loss of military manpower to the United States as immigrant waves moved westward across the Atlantic. State power was correlated with the number of able-bodied soldiers and seamen. That was the material explanation behind the political theoretic of “perpetual allegiance,” under which transfer of nationality was thought to be a philosophical impossibility. European states refused to recognize the legitimacy of naturalization in the United States. For its part, the United States needed new bodies to grow its own military and economic strength, which required admission of immigrants to the citizenry. The result was bilateral contradiction: two states, each of which claimed an individual as its national without recognizing the validity of the competing claim.

Dual nationality was a cause of the War of 1812, as British naval forces abducted from US vessels (“impressed,” in the vocabulary of the day) naturalized Americans whom the Crown still considered to be its subjects. More typically, the conflict involved immigrants to the United States who returned to their European homelands for visits only to find themselves locked up for evading military service obligations. This was a particular problem with German states refusing to recognize US naturalization of their native-born subjects. Major diplomatic disputes erupted as these naturalized US citizens turned to US diplomatic authorities to protect them from maltreatment by the homeland sovereigns. In some cases the wrong to US interests was clear. Where immigrants returned home on a permanent basis, resort to US intervention was less justified and in some cases refused. Either way, dual nationals destabilized important bilateral relations, creating serious diplomatic headaches as states staked out competing claims to individuals.

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