Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices

T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, editors

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

April 2001

Summary

 

If citizenship is commonly understood as membership in a nation-stateand if nation-states are finding themselves under pressure from globalization, many would assume that citizenship is becoming an outdated concept. Instead, citizenship has emerged as a major theme connecting policy areas from welfare, education, and labor to international relations and migration. And it has taken on added significance as a result of the now-common mass movement of people, which makes virtually all developed states multicultural and multiracial. The integration of these immigrant communities presents significant domestic and foreign policy challenges for receiving and sending states.

Citizenship Today brings together leading experts to define the core issues at stake in citizenship debates. The first section investigates central trends in national citizenship policy that govern access to citizenship, the rights of aliens, and plural nationality. The following section explores how forms of citizenship and their practice are, can, and should be located within broader institutional structures. The third section examines different concepts of citizenship, as developed in the official policies of governments, the scholarly literature, and the practice of immigrants. The final part looks at the future for citizenship policy.