Preserving Essential Protections While Reorganizing Political Membership
Suppose a country decides that people who have made their lives within its territory should be able to become equal political members, regardless of the nationality they inherited at birth.
What should happen to nationality?
Should the country abolish it?
That would be too simple.
Nationality is connected to more than political membership. It also serves important functions involving travel documents, protection abroad, legal identity, and responsibilities between states.
Removing these functions without establishing reliable alternatives could make people less secure, even when the reform is intended to expand their freedom.
In The World Citizen Society, I develop a principle for institutional change:
Decompose before abolishing, and replace before removing.
An earlier essay, What Becomes of Nationality?, explained why nationality should be understood as a bundle of functions rather than a single, indivisible institution.
Here I want to ask a more practical question.
What can existing institutions teach us about separating those functions? Where do their limits appear? And what happens when an old legal status disappears before its replacement is secure?
The answers matter because institutional reform is not only about what we want to change. It is also about what people must not lose along the way.
Political Membership — From Birth to Residence
The World Citizen Revolution seeks to change the inherited structure of political membership.
Under the present system, people may live in a country for decades, work, pay taxes, and remain subject to its political decisions without becoming full political members.
Resident Sovereignty proposes that durable residence, rather than inherited nationality, should become the primary basis of ordinary political membership.
This does not mean that everyone immediately acquires full membership upon entering a country. Nor does it require nationality to lose all its other legal functions.
The European Union’s long-term residents directive illustrates both the possibilities and the limits of separating residence from nationality.
Under Council Directive 2003/109/EC, qualifying nationals of countries outside the EU can obtain long-term resident status after generally five years of legal and continuous residence in a participating member state.
Applicants must satisfy additional conditions, including requirements concerning stable resources and health insurance. Member states may also impose integration conditions within the directive’s framework.
The status offers important protections and equal treatment in specified areas, subject to exceptions.
Yet it does not make the holder a citizen of the receiving country or confer full national political rights.
A person may therefore gain a more secure legal right to live in a country without gaining the right to participate as an equal member in its national political decisions.
My second book proposes a further institutional requirement: Membership Security.
Once a durable resident has become a full political member, retaining another nationality should not leave that person subject to ordinary immigration-law removal merely because of foreign nationality.
The EU long-term resident status does not provide that full guarantee.
It demonstrates a partial separation of functions, not the completed freedom of political-community choice.
Travel Documents and Shared Consular Assistance
Other nationality functions have also been separated in limited ways.
As discussed in What Becomes of Nationality?, Article 28 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Statelessness Convention provides for travel documents for qualifying refugees and stateless persons.
Such documents do not grant nationality in the issuing state. Nor do they guarantee admission to every other country.
Their importance is specific: international travel does not always require an ordinary passport issued by a person’s state of nationality.
A related example concerns assistance abroad.
Under Directive (EU) 2015/637, an EU citizen whose own member state is unrepresented in a non-EU country may receive consular assistance from another member state, subject to the applicable conditions.
EU citizenship still depends on nationality of a member state. This is not nationality-independent protection.
Nevertheless, the example shows that the state providing assistance need not always be the state whose nationality a person holds.
Imagine someone who retains the nationality of Country A but becomes a full political member of Country B.
If that person encounters serious difficulties while visiting Country C, who should help?
Consular assistance may involve practical help after an arrest, the loss of travel documents, or an emergency abroad.
Diplomatic protection is different. It concerns a state formally invoking another state’s responsibility under international law for an injury caused by an internationally wrongful act.
Helping someone obtain emergency documents is not the same legal function as making an international claim against another government.
Reorganizing one does not automatically reorganize the other.
A future World Citizen Society would have to decide which institution can act, under what authority, and how responsibility is shared.
That is harder than simply saying that nationality’s functions should be separated.
Digital Identity Without Political Membership
Estonia’s e-Residency program illustrates another possibility.
Eligible people living outside Estonia can obtain a government-issued digital identity for specified electronic services, including digital signatures and business administration.
But Estonia makes clear that e-Residency is not citizenship or physical residence.
It does not grant the right to enter Estonia, settle there, or become a political member. Its digital identity card is not a travel document or an ordinary physical identity document.
The distinction is particularly important for Foot Democracy.
The ability to register a company or sign a document online is not the freedom to choose a political community.
Still, digital services may improve administrative cooperation and make certain legal relationships easier to manage across borders.
They could become useful parts of future institutional reform.
But digital administration raises problems of its own.
Identity systems must protect personal information, allow errors to be corrected, and guard against unauthorized access. People also need practical alternatives when they cannot use digital technology.
There is a political concern here as well. A system that makes administrative activity easier to monitor may improve convenience while weakening privacy.
Separating legal identity from nationality should not leave individuals dependent on a single database that they cannot effectively challenge or correct.
Technology can perform administrative functions. It cannot determine what political membership ought to mean.
When Replacement Fails — The JY Case
The danger of removing an existing legal status before its replacement is secure is not merely theoretical.
Consider JY, an Estonian woman living in Austria.
In 2008, she applied for Austrian citizenship.
In March 2014, the Austrian authorities assured her that citizenship would be granted if she relinquished her Estonian nationality within the prescribed period and satisfied the applicable conditions.
She followed the procedure.
In August 2015, she relinquished her Estonian citizenship and became stateless.
But she did not receive Austrian citizenship.
In July 2017, the Austrian authorities withdrew their earlier assurance and rejected her application.
They relied on administrative offenses, including failure to display a vehicle inspection disc and driving under the influence of alcohol, in assessing whether she still satisfied the conditions for Austrian citizenship.
These were not simply allegations that she had disagreed with the government. They concerned conduct regulated under laws protecting public order and road safety.
JY challenged the decision.
The case eventually reached the Court of Justice of the European Union, which delivered its judgment in JY v Wiener Landesregierung on January 18, 2022.
The Court did not rule that a state must always grant citizenship once it has issued an assurance of naturalization. Nor did it prohibit every requirement to relinquish an existing nationality.
Its judgment was more specific.
JY had lost not only Estonian nationality but also EU citizenship. Withdrawal of the Austrian assurance prevented her from recovering EU citizenship through the planned naturalization.
The Court held that this situation fell within the scope of EU law and that the withdrawal had to satisfy the principle of proportionality.
In ordinary terms, the authorities had to consider whether such a serious consequence was justified in light of the conduct on which they relied.
The Court found that the administrative offenses in question did not justify the withdrawal in the circumstances it examined, particularly given the resulting loss of the prospect of recovering EU citizenship.
The judgment also addressed the responsibility of the state whose nationality the applicant is asked to relinquish. In principle, that state should ensure that the loss of nationality takes effect only when the new nationality has actually been acquired.
The case exposes a danger created by the interaction of two legal systems.
One state allowed JY to lose her existing nationality. Another withdrew the assurance on which she had relied.
Between those decisions, she was left without nationality.
She had sought a new citizenship voluntarily. But that did not mean she had chosen to become stateless.
A promised replacement is not the same as a secured replacement.
Here, replace before removing is no longer an abstract principle. It concerns what happens to a person’s rights while two governments administer a change of legal status.
The sequence matters as much as the intended destination.
What Must Not Be Lost
The JY case concerns naturalization under existing nationality law, not the creation of a World Citizen Society.
The circumstances are different, but the institutional problem reaches further.
When one legal status is surrendered in anticipation of another, the transition must protect people against losing essential rights between the two.
This is especially important for the right of return, legal identity, recognition of family relationships, and prevention of statelessness.
Birth registration and nationality acquisition are different legal processes. A child may have a nationality without having been registered at birth, or may be registered without acquiring a nationality.
Failures in either system can leave children vulnerable, making it harder to establish their identity, prove their nationality, or secure the rights associated with it.
A new residence-based political membership system must therefore protect both reliable birth registration and effective safeguards against statelessness.
The earlier essay on Latvia’s non-citizens presents another difficulty.
Their special status does not confer full electoral membership, but it carries important residence and return protections. Removing that status without preserving those protections could make people worse off.
This is why reform must be judged by more than whether an old legal category disappears.
If people gain a new form of political membership but lose a secure place to live, reliable documentation, or protection against statelessness, something essential has gone wrong.
The object is not to retain every existing institution indefinitely.
It is to change unjustified political distinctions without destroying protections that people still need.
Who Takes Responsibility?
The examples examined here point toward a problem that cannot be solved by separating functions alone.
Who takes responsibility when the separation creates a gap?
The EU long-term residence system provides important rights without granting nationality. Convention travel documents depend on recognition by other states. Shared consular assistance requires agreement about which authority can act.
Digital identity needs reliable administration and safeguards against misuse.
And JY’s experience shows what can happen when two states make decisions about legal status without ensuring that their procedures fit together.
The problem is not simply that institutions are different.
It is that a person may depend on several institutions, each of which assumes that another will provide the necessary protection.
A World Citizen Society cannot resolve this merely by making residence the primary basis of political membership.
It must also determine which community is responsible for particular rights, which institution performs necessary functions, and where people can seek a remedy when something goes wrong.
Some responsibilities may follow residence. Others may continue to depend on nationality or international agreements.
Different systems may coexist for many years. That is not necessarily a failure.
My second book considers Thin Nationality as one possible residual form of nationality: a limited legal connection that could continue to serve certain international functions without determining ordinary political membership.
It is a possibility, not a mandatory model for every political community.
The important question is whether people can actually rely on the arrangements established for them.
No government should be able to escape an existing responsibility merely by changing the legal category assigned to a person.
Nor should people discover, only when they need assistance, that two authorities each consider the other responsible.
Institutional reform requires cooperation. It also requires accountability when cooperation fails.
Change the Principle, Preserve the Protections
The World Citizen Revolution is not a campaign to destroy passports, identity records, consular services, or the obligations that states owe to people.
Its central challenge concerns the inherited rules governing political membership.
Existing institutions show that some functions of nationality can be separated. But their limitations are just as important.
Residence security is not full political membership. Travel documents are not unrestricted admission rights. Shared consular assistance does not eliminate nationality. Digital identity is not Foot Democracy.
And an assurance of future citizenship is not a guarantee that an existing nationality can safely be surrendered.
These distinctions help us see what institutional change must accomplish.
The purpose of unbundling nationality is not to eliminate useful protections. It is to prevent inherited nationality from remaining the decisive barrier to political membership while preserving the functions on which people depend.
Some functions can be reorganized sooner than others. Others may remain connected to nationality for many years.
A World Citizen Society does not require a single new legal status to take over every function of the old one.
It requires a political order in which belonging becomes more open to choice without leaving people less protected during the change.
We should not measure reform by how quickly an existing status is abolished.
We should ask whether people gain political freedom while retaining legal security.
A World Citizen Society must find ways to provide both.
Further Reading
Books
- The World Citizen Revolution — On inherited political membership and the institutional transformation it requires.
- The World Citizen Society — Especially Chapters 8 and 22, on nationality’s functions and their reassignment.
Related Essays
- What Becomes of Nationality?
- No Permanent Transition: When Temporary Restrictions Become Permanent Inequality
- When Does Residence Become Full Membership?
- Once Entry Is Won, How Is It Protected?
References
- Council of the European Union. Council Directive 2003/109/EC concerning the status of third-country nationals who are long-term residents, November 25, 2003, as amended. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32003L0109
- European Commission. EU Long-Term Residence. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/migrant-integration/eu-long-term-residence_en
- United Nations. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, Article 28. https://www.unhcr.org/media/convention-and-protocol-relating-status-refugees
- United Nations. Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, 1954, Article 28. https://www.unhcr.org/media/convention-relating-status-stateless-persons
- Council of the European Union. Directive (EU) 2015/637 on consular protection for unrepresented citizens of the Union in third countries. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2015/637/oj
- International Law Commission. Draft Articles on Diplomatic Protection, with Commentaries, 2006. https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_8_2006.pdf
- Republic of Estonia. What Is e-Residency? Official e-Residency Knowledge Base. https://learn.e-resident.gov.ee/hc/en-gb/articles/360000711978-What-is-e-Residency
- Court of Justice of the European Union. JY v Wiener Landesregierung, Case C-118/20, Grand Chamber Judgment, January 18, 2022, ECLI:EU:C:2022:34. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62020CJ0118
- United Nations. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, 1961. https://www.unhcr.org/media/convention-reduction-statelessness
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