Multiple Citizenship: Rhetoric and Regime Change in 5 CEE EU Member States

Multiple citizenship offers an excellent lense to study and discuss the contemporary situation in constructing citizenship as a concept and as a regime. As a borderline case multiple citizenship is contested in practice and the debates provide valuable information about the substantive dimensions and inherent contradictions of citizenship. To what extent the debates are related to the dynamics of legal regimes is another interesting question. The paper consists of a theoretical part and an empirical study with a concluding discussion. The theoretical part elaborates the dimensions and aporias of citizenship and multiple citizenship. The empirical study focuses on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Croatia, the new European Union member states of Central and Eastern Europe. Here we find both the experiences of post communism, rebuilding nation states and Europeanization. Central and Eastern Europe has been relatively conservative in citizenship regulation and is the current location of many of the tensions related to (multiple) statehood and citizenship. So the tensions within citizenship should be empirically well reflected. The key interest is to review (1) to what extent the liberalisation of the legislation on multiple citizenship has continued in the last decade and (2) in which ways this has been reflected in internationally oriented media coverage and discourse. Among other aspects the paper examines to which extent the post 9/11 securitisation has impacted the previously liberalising trends in multiple citizenship legislation but also how well this is reflected in the rhetoric of national and international institutions and the contemporary mediatised public sphere.