The Instrumental Turn of Citizenship in Regional Organisations: The Cases of the European Union and the Union of South American Nations

The development of rights and belonging within regional organisations takes place in a variety of forms, even if these are commonly considered replicas of the model of European Union (EU) citizenship. Joppke (2010) has argued that the emergence of communities in which the enforcement of citizenship rights is not premised on equivalence between the status of citizenship and belonging leads to instrumentalisation and the ‘lightening of citizenship’. Hence, the objective of this paper is to examine the instrumental turn of citizenship in supranational organisations of a different kind. The study uses the EU and the Union of South American Nations (USAN) as case studies of regional organisations in which the link between national and supranational citizenships is conceived of and regulated in distinct ways. In these organisations, supranational citizenship reinforces the instrumentalisation of national citizenship, but the latter happens independently. To show this dynamic, the paper will focus on two modes of citizenship acquisition that commonly do not entail physical relocation of individuals. Naturalisation through cultural affinity and naturalisation through special merit, as mechanisms for group- and individual-based admission, which are exemplary of the instrumental uses of citizenship. The paper starts with a discussion of membership in supranational polities. It then empirically shows the instrumental turn of citizenship in supranational organisations using the EUDO Citizenship modes of acquisition database. The paper concludes with a reflection on the dynamics of citizenship transformation in differently structured regional organisations.