Daniel Sharp

In recent years, states have expanded their formal legal powers to strip their subjects of citizenship. But should states have the power to revoke citizenship? If so, how may this power be permissibly exercised, and how ought it to be constrained? This article argues that some standard critiques of denationalization face some important limitations. These limitations stem from the fact that these critiques fail to identify the distinctiveness of citizenship as a status, and, thus, fail to identify an objection that is directly connected with citizenship loss. To supplement these critiques, I offer a framework for understanding the value of citizenship, which draws attention to the egalitarian functions of citizenship. This yields a novel interpretation and defense of the charge that denationalization is problematically inegalitarian: viz., denationalization threatens to impair the egalitarian functions of citizenship.

Citizenship regimes are under pressure. Decades of neoliberalism have eroded the social rights that make citizenship into a form of equal membership. Concurrently, democracies have hardened the borders of their citizenship regimes. In this paper, I contend that these two dynamics are interlinked. Based on this diagnosis, I argue that the familiar claim that democracies must choose between broadening and deepening citizenship is, in the long-term, mistaken. Deepening citizenship is necessary for broadening citizenship because economic precarity trengthens support for the far-right. Broadening citizenship is necessary for deepening citizenship because only an inclusive conception of citizenship can counter the neoliberal nationalist ideology that fuels the erosion of social citizenship.

Egalitarians often claim that well-off states’ immigration restrictions create or reinforce objectionable inequality. Standard defenses of this claim appeal to the distributive consequences of exclusion. This article offers a relational egalitarian defense of more open borders. On this view, well-off states’ immigration restrictions are problematic because they accord the citizens of well-off states a troubling form of asymmetric power over the disadvantaged. This creates an objectionably unequal relationship between affluent states’ citizens and disadvantaged immigrants. I show that this argument offers a compelling diagnosis of a central problem with border control, defend the argument against objections, and explore its implications.