The right of blood: ‘ethnically’ selective citizenship policies in Europe

ABSTRACT This paper explores citizenship policies in Europe with the aim of testing the salience of the ethnic–civic binary distinction. The paper starts with an overview of the existing typologies of citizenship regimes, with a special emphasis on the civic–ethnic dichotomy. After a brief assessment of different types of selective acquisition policies in the EU, the paper discusses the emerging normative legal framework of citizenship attribution in Europe. The paper shows that the Europeanization of citizenship acquisition norms legitimizes, if not encourages, selectivity in the case of non-resident ethnic kin populations. It is also argued that due to the ambiguous international legal coding, preferential naturalization allows ethnonationalist governments to strengthen the symbolic claims of the titular national groups over the state. But quite paradoxically, these ethnically framed policies in practice often open up the possibility of the facilitated naturalization for individuals who can hardly be considered ‘co-ethnics’ in the thick sociocultural sense of the word. Therefore, ethnonationalist political projects that emphasize the importance the ‘right of blood’ may lead to the naturalization of individuals who have very weak cultural or linguistic ties to their putative ‘homelands’. Thus, ethnically framed citizenship policies may water down ethnic homogeneity rather than strengthening it.