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When Democracies Denationalize: The Epistemological Case against Revoking Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

Elizabeth F. Cohen
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Extract

Discomfort with denationalization spans both proceduralist and consequentialist objections. I augment Patti Lenard's arguments against denationalization with an epistemological argument. What makes denationalization problematic for democratic theorists are not simply the procedures used to impose this penalty or its consequences but also the permanence of this type of punishment. Because democratic theory assumes citizens to be subject to developmental processes that can substantially alter a person's character in politically relevant ways, I argue in favor of states imposing only revocable punishments. Penalties removing people's rights and political standing must be accompanied by avenues for periodic reconsideration of such punishments in order to meet Lenard's standard of democratic legitimacy.

Type
Democracies and the Power to Revoke Citizenship: Three Views
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Summer 2016 , pp. 253 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Lenard broaches this topic and cites Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 101–103.

2 Demleitner, Nora V., “Preventing Internal Exile: The Need for Restrictions on Collateral Sentencing Consequences,” Stanford Law & Policy Review 11, no. 153 (1999)Google Scholar.

3 Elizabeth F. Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

4 I do not mean to suggest here that no one has made arguments in favor of restricting the due process rights of people suspected of posing national security threats. Rather, I mean only to say that those arguments must draw on normative and non-normative reasoning outside of the realm of democratic theory.

5 Spiro, Peter J., “Expatriating Terrorists,” Fordham Law Review 82 (2014), p. 2178 Google Scholar.

6 This seems to be the path that the United Kingdom is following. (Katrin Bennhold, “Britain Increasingly Invokes Power to Disown Its Citizens,” New York Times, April 9, 2014.

7 Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics.

8 U.S. courts have insisted that denaturalization is not punishment but simply the revocation of citizenship in cases where it never should have existed because the individual made false claims about their character, actions, and intentions in order to obtain citizenship. Patrick Weil has noted both the legal and logical ambiguity of the reasoning used by the courts. Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 172.

9 Sara Forsdyke, Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy: The Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 3.

10 Gibney, Matthew J., “Should Citizenship Be Conditional? The Ethics of Denationalization,” The Journal of Politics 75, no. 3 (2013), p. 648 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Gibney, “Should Citizenship Be Conditional?” p. 648, citing Kingston, Rebecca, “The Unmaking of Citizens: Banishment and the Modern Citizenship Regime in France,” Citizenship Studies 9, no. 1 (2005), pp. 23–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Gregor Noll, “Readmission Agreements,” in Matthew J. Gibney and Randall Hansen, eds., Volume 1: Entries A-I of Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to Present (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC CLIO, 2005), p. 495.

13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973).

14 Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 13.

15 Leonard Noisette, “The Risks of Permanent Punishment,” New York Times, November 15, 201; Jennifer Lackey, “The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences,” New York Times, February 1, 2016.

16 Caitlin Dickson, “America's Recidivism Nightmare: A New Government Study Shows a Disturbing Trend for the Prison Population,” Daily Beast, April 4, 2014.

17 As scholars of migration have noted, often the countries from which people flee to democratic states are unable to defend basic democratic rights. See Lindsey N. Kingston and Kathryn Stam, “Recovering from Statelessness: Resettled Bhutanese-Nepali and Karen Refugees Reflect on Lack of Legal Nationality,” International Journal of Human Rights (forthcoming); Coughlan, Reed, Stam, Kathryn, and Kingston, Lindsey N., “Struggling to Start Over: Human Rights Challenges for Somali Bantu Refugees in the United States,” International Journal of Human Rights 20, no. 1 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.