The instrumental turn of citizenship

Instrumentalism, I argued earlier [Joppke, Christian. 2010a. “The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship.” European Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 9–32.], is the heart of an ‘inevitable lightening’ of citizenship in liberal societies. This theme is further developed here, in two directions. Normatively, I argue that the Roman tradition of legal citizenship provides a better foil for understanding current citizenship developments than Greek political citizenship, which is predominant in political theory. Empirically, three cases of instrumentalism are highlighted: the selling of citizenship, expanding provisions of external citizenship, and the rapidly evolving European Union citizenship as a citizenship without identity. While states have always been strategists in matters of citizenship, particularly in inter-state relations, the novelty is to see individuals also in this role, seizing possibilities that states have often inadvertently created for them