Critics of differentiated citizenship have also argued that policies that break with universalism blind to difference can only weaken the integrative function of citizenship. While the adoption of multicultural and minority rights causes citizens to lose their sense of collective belonging, it can also affect their willingness to compromise and sacrifice for each other. Citizens can then develop a purely strategic attitude towards people from different backgrounds. As Joseph Carens says: “From this point of view, the danger is […] Differentiated citizenship consists in the fact that its emphasis on the recognition and institutionalization of differences could undermine the conditions that allow a sense of common identification and therefore reciprocity” (Carens 2000, 193). Critics of Aboriginal claims to self-government rights have used violence to advance this concern (Cairns, 2000). In 2007, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a British citizenship test to clarify the legal rights and obligations of different categories of citizenship and nationality, as well as incentives for residents to become citizens. The Lord Goldsmith Citizenship Review was also invited to “examine the role of citizens and residents in civil society, including voting, jury service and other forms of citizen participation”. Although the review focused on the legal aspects of citizenship, it was again placed in a broader political context. One way to address this disparity is to rethink how the right to citizenship is determined. In a world characterized by high levels of migration between states, birthright citizenship – acquired either by descent (jus sanguinis) or by birth on the territory (jus soli) – can lead to counterintuitive results: while a regime of pure ius sanguinis systematically excludes immigrants and their children, although the latter may be born and raised in their parents` new home, These include descendants of expatriates who may never have set foot in the homeland of their ancestors. On the other hand, a regime of ius soli can grant citizenship to children whose birth is random in the region, while denying citizenship to children who arrived in the country at a very young age.

Although some states extend the right to vote to resident non-citizens at the local level[28], it is the increasing extension of the right to vote to non-resident citizens in recent decades that is particularly striking (Pogonyi 2014). It shows the persistence of a conception of belonging based on the understanding of the nation-state as a historical community of citizens with common values and ethnocultural characteristics. From this point of view, the right to vote is not understood territorially, but follows the citizen when she settles outside her country of origin. Although one can understand some of the pragmatic reasons that often motivate some States to recognize the right to vote for expatriates (for example, to recognize and promote their continued contribution to the homeland by paying remittances), normative theorists have mainly criticized this phenomenon (see, in particular, Lopez-Guerra 2005). In particular, the policy pursued by some States of the former socialist federations (USSR and Yugoslavia) to recognize the right to vote for coethnics living in integrated areas in neighbouring independent States, as well as the recent decisions of States such as Hungary and Romania to extend the right to vote to cross-border ethnic relatives, should draw our attention to the dangers to regional stability, which implies the “reethnization of citizenship” (Joppke 2005, quoted by Pogonyi in 2014). Moreover, if the electoral system is not designed to limit the potential political impact of the non-resident electoral management body, external voting may affect the “right of the resident constituency to democratic self-determination” (Pogonyi 2014, 135-136). Citizenship status in social contract theory implies both rights and obligations. In this sense, citizenship has been described as “a set of rights – first and foremost political participation in the life of the community, the right to vote and the right to receive some protection from the community, as well as obligations”. [40] Citizenship is considered by most researchers to be culture-specific, in the sense that the meaning of the term varies considerably from culture to culture and over time. [10] In China, for example, there is a cultural policy of citizenship that could be called “people.” [41] Modern citizenship was often seen as two competing basic ideas:[43] National Socialism, the German variant of twentieth-century fascism, classified the country`s inhabitants into three broad hierarchical categories, each with different rights in relation to the state: citizens, subjects, and foreigners. The first category, citizens, should have all civil rights and obligations.

Citizenship was granted only to men of German (or so-called “Aryan”) origin who had performed their military service and could be revoked by the state at any time. The Reich Citizenship Act of 1935 established racial criteria for citizenship in the German Reich, and because of this law, Jews and others who could not “prove” German racial heritage were stripped of their citizenship. [38] There is still a complex relationship between immigration, citizenship and “race,” which is an important part of the public debate. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, for example, warned: “Migration threatens the ethics or DNA of our nation” (Times, January 7, 2010).