Citizenship [en]

What I liked about this book:

• It was not just about the US.
• It was absolutely fascinating, shocking, and very eye-opening about our « western » societies.

What I disliked about this book:

• It was at times very philosophical and abstract, and it did not always provide enough concrete examples.
• It took me a huge amount of time to read because I had to learn more about every fact mentioned in the book!

Thoughts:

• This book makes me realize how incredibly lucky I am to have the rights and freedoms and opportunities I got. Everything in our lives, good and bad, is a result of what citizenships(s) we have!
• Something I never thought about before: as a French citizen living in Canada, I enjoy all of the rights of the French citizens but none of the duties of the French residents. I don’t pay taxes in France today, but I could still return tomorrow and immediately enjoy rights that a non-citizen would spend years trying to acquire. As a French citizen abroad, I possess:
  • A guaranteed right of return.
  • Access to one of the world’s wealthier democracies.
  • The right to vote in French presidential, parliamentary, European, and other elections.
  • The right to run for public office.
  • The right to enter, live, and work in France without ANY restrictions.
  • The right to consular protection from the French state anywhere in the world.
  • The right to live and work throughout the European Union under EU free-movement rules.
• Citizenship is not based on identity: two 50-year old universities professors, smart, women, with no kids, not married, and living in Canada, do not necessarily have the same citizenship. The opposite is true, too: an LGBTQ+ woman of colour, single, with no kids, university professor, and living in Germany, can have the Canadian citizenship just as much as a a white supremacist man, farmer, married, with five kids, living in the US.
• Citizenship is also not about values (although it’s often claimed it is), since a murderous Norwegian still enjoys the same rights and opportunities as « good » Norwegians, while a virtuous and smart Pakistani woman will not be welcomed anywhere in the world or treated fairly, even in her own country. This also creates situations where a Dutch sociopath can vote, but not a non-citizen who was born in The Netherlands and has been living a good and honest life there. And the sociopath will probably vote on laws that will affect the non-citizen a lot more than they will affect him.

Exemples:

• A child born in American Samoa will not be a U.S. citizen, acquiring a U.S. “non-citizen national” status instead, although American Samoa is a territory fully under the sovereignty of the United States.
• One out of five Swiss citizens has two nationalities or more.
• A child  born from two Colombian parents in a country where children are NOT automatically given citizenship if they are born there (e.g., France) has no citizenship!
• In 2017, Cambodia took away the citizenship of more than 100,000 people from minority ethnicities, saying that these people’s ancestors had originally come « from somewhere else. »
• The splitting up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia produced several new citizenships, with some newly created countries (such as the Czech Republic) taking the exercise of defining « who we are as a nation » as an opportunity to get rid of minorities like the Roma.
• According to UNHCR, there are roughly ten million stateless people around the world today.
• Not all EU countries are in the Schengen agreement (Cyprus and Ireland) and not all Schengen countries are in the EU (e.g., Iceland).