Nationality is not one thing. It is a bundle of functions.
Imagine two people.
One was born in a country but has lived abroad for twenty years.
The other was born elsewhere but has lived in that country for twenty years, works there, pays taxes there, raises a family there, and depends on its institutions every day.
Which of them is more deeply connected to the political community?
In “From Nationality to Residence”, I argued that durable residence should carry greater weight in political membership.
But that argument creates another question.
If political membership moves toward residence, what happens to nationality?
Does nationality disappear?
Do passports disappear?
What happens to return rights, consular protection, pensions, family law, or legal identity?
The answer is not to abolish nationality in one stroke.
It is to separate the different things nationality currently does.
Nationality is not one thing. It is a bundle of functions.
One Status, Many Functions
Modern states often use nationality to answer many different questions.
Who belongs politically?
Who may return?
Who may remain securely?
Who receives a passport?
Who receives consular protection abroad?
Which state may exercise diplomatic protection?
Which legal connection matters for taxation, family law, succession, or social benefits?
Who is protected against statelessness?
These questions are often tied to one legal status.
That creates administrative simplicity.
But it does not prove that every function requires the same legal connection.
This is the starting point of Nationality Function Decomposition.
The idea is simple:
separate the functions now bundled into nationality and ask what relationship each function actually requires.
Some may continue to depend on nationality.
Others may follow residence.
Others may follow contribution history, family relationship, habitual residence, treaty status, or actual political membership.
The guiding principle is:
Decompose before abolishing, and replace before removing.
Political Membership Can Move Without Moving Everything Else
Political membership is the function the World Citizen framework moves most clearly toward durable residence.
Residents live under the law, use public institutions, pay taxes, build families, and experience political decisions directly.
That creates a political relationship that inherited nationality alone does not capture.
But separating political membership from nationality does not require every other nationality-linked function to disappear at the same time.
That is the advantage of decomposition.
We Already Separate Functions
This is not entirely hypothetical.
Modern legal systems already contain examples in which functions usually associated with nationality are separated from the nationality of the person concerned.
Consular Protection
An EU citizen in a third country may find that their own member state has no embassy or consulate there.
EU law allows that person, in such circumstances, to seek protection from the diplomatic or consular authorities of another EU member state under the same conditions as nationals of that state.
Nationality still matters.
But the authority providing protection does not always have to be the person’s own nationality state.
That is already a partial separation of function from nationality.
Travel Documents
Ordinary passports are strongly connected to nationality.
But international law already recognizes travel documents for some people who cannot use an ordinary national passport.
The 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons provide for Convention Travel Documents for qualifying refugees and stateless persons.
These documents do not abolish nationality-based passports.
They show something narrower:
international travel documentation is not logically limited to an ordinary passport issued by a person’s nationality state.
Political membership can therefore move toward residence even if travel documents remain nationality-linked for some time, or are later reorganized through another internationally recognized status.
The two functions do not have to move together.
Succession
The European Union’s Succession Regulation provides another example.
Its general rule uses the deceased person’s habitual residence to determine the law applicable to the succession as a whole.
At the same time, a person may choose the law of a state whose nationality they possess.
So nationality remains relevant.
But it is not the only connecting factor.
The function is organized through more than one legal relationship.
These examples do not prove the World Citizen Society.
They show that nationality functions can already be separated without the legal order collapsing.
Return Requires Special Attention
The right to return is more difficult.
Nationality today often provides the strongest connection to a state for purposes of re-entry.
But suppose someone becomes a full political member through durable residence.
They leave temporarily for work, family, study, or travel.
Should crossing the border turn that full member back into an outsider seeking fresh immigration permission?
That would undermine the security of membership itself.
If residence-based political membership is to be meaningful, secure membership must increasingly include a reliable right of return.
That does not mean nationality-based return rights must immediately disappear.
Both can coexist during transition.
The important point is that return should increasingly follow secure membership, not inherited nationality alone.
Different Functions Need Different Connections
The same logic applies to social rights, taxation, family law, and succession.
A pension may depend primarily on contribution history.
Social assistance may depend on need and residence.
Healthcare access may depend on residence or insurance.
Tax liability may depend on residence, source, property, or business activity.
Family-law and succession rules may use habitual residence, domicile, nationality, or other connecting factors.
There is no reason to assume that one status must answer all of these questions.
The better question is:
Which connection best fits the function?
That is the practical meaning of decomposition.
Nationality Is Also an Identity
There is an important objection.
Nationality is not only a legal classification.
For many people, it is also an identity.
It can express language, history, family memory, national solidarity, cultural attachment, or a sense of belonging.
Nationality Function Decomposition does not require those attachments to disappear.
It asks a narrower institutional question:
Which legal rights and powers really need to depend on nationality?
A person may continue to identify strongly as Japanese, French, Mexican, Nigerian, or American even if some political or social functions come to depend more heavily on residence.
Legal decomposition is not cultural erasure.
The distinction is between identity and institutional function.
They can overlap.
They do not have to be identical.
Statelessness Is a Warning
Decomposition also has risks.
If nationality-linked functions are removed before replacement institutions work, people can be left in legal uncertainty.
Travel documentation may become unreliable.
Return rights may weaken.
External protection may become unclear.
Children may face problems of legal identity.
That is why statelessness prevention matters.
Reform should not create freedom in one area by producing legal insecurity in another.
Hence the second half of the principle:
replace before removing.
A useful nationality-linked protection should not disappear until another institution can perform the function reliably.
One Possible Result: a Thinner Form of Nationality
What might remain of nationality after decomposition?
Possibly quite a lot.
Nationality may continue to matter for travel identity, some forms of return, consular and diplomatic protection, anti-statelessness safeguards, and other external legal relationships.
One possible result is a thinner form of nationality.
Nationality would continue to exist, but it would no longer serve as the master status determining ordinary political rank.
That is only one possible institutional outcome.
The fixed principle is Nationality Function Decomposition.
What remains should depend on which functions still genuinely require nationality.
A More Complicated System?
One status is simple.
Function-specific institutions are more complicated.
A person may have political membership in one community, pension rights accrued in another, tax obligations connected to several places, and family relationships recognized across borders.
That requires coordination.
But the current system is already more complicated than the word “nationality” makes it appear.
Nationality often hides several distinct relationships inside a single label.
Decomposition makes them visible.
The question becomes not:
Are you a citizen or a foreigner?
but:
What relationship is relevant to this particular right or obligation?
That is a more demanding question.
It may also be a more accurate one.
Conclusion
The World Citizen Society does not require nationality to disappear.
It requires us to stop asking nationality to do everything.
Modern law already shows that some nationality functions can be separated.
Some functions may remain tied to nationality.
Others may move toward residence.
Others may depend on contribution, habitual residence, family relationship, treaty status, or secure political membership.
The task is not abolition for its own sake.
It is institutional precision.
And no difficult external function should become an excuse for preserving inherited political hierarchy internally.
Nationality is not one thing. It is a bundle.
The rule for reform is:
Decompose before abolishing, and replace before removing.
Notes
Nationality Function Decomposition means separating the legal functions currently bundled into nationality so that each can be retained, reassigned, or replaced according to the relationship it actually requires.
Article 23 TFEU provides consular and diplomatic protection for unrepresented EU citizens in third countries through other EU member states under specified conditions.
Article 28 of both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons provides for Convention Travel Documents for qualifying persons.
Under Regulation (EU) No. 650/2012, habitual residence is the general connecting factor for succession, while nationality may still be used through a choice-of-law mechanism.
Reducing the political importance of nationality should not create statelessness or remove useful protections before replacement institutions exist.
Further Reading
For the argument that durable residence should receive greater weight in political membership, see Resident Sovereignty.
For the earlier argument about moving political membership from nationality toward residence, see “From Nationality to Residence”.
For the full institutional treatment, see Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society, Chapter 8, “What Becomes of Nationality?”, pp. 101–109.
For the earlier analytical treatment of nationality as a bundle of separable legal functions, see Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Revolution.
