Genuine links and useful passports : a decline of citizenship?

This contribution was delivered on the occasion of the EUI State of the Union in Florence on 4 May 2017Citizenship is at its core a legal status of nationality that determines which state is responsible for which individual. Both this division of responsibilities between states and the democratic ideal of citizenship as membership in a self-governing community presuppose genuine links between states and their citizens. Numerous phenomena seem to signal that both states and individuals often regard citizenship as a mere tool rather than as a value in itself: the proliferation of multiple nationalities; citizenship programmes for non-resident investors; worldwide access to EU passports for those with the ‘right ancestry’; and stripping terrorist suspects of their citizenship in order to ‘dump’ them on other countries. Is citizenship bound to decline in the 21st century