The State-National Citizenship Model, 1859–1866

Chapter 5 Emulating the Second French Empire: the State-National Citizenship Model, 1859–1866

1 Models of Nation-State Citizenship

The political reorganization of Moldavia and Wallachia under the 1858 Convention set the foundations of the Romanian nation-state and opened a period of socio-political renewal. The creation of Romanian citizenship was marked by the confrontation between two ideal-type models of nation-state citizenship, which can be generically named “state-national” and “ethno- national.”1 Although sharing several common features, these models differed in the techniques used to forge their national community, by emphasizing the legal principles of jus soli or jus sanguinis. The two models also diverged according to the political values underlying the type of citizenship community they embodied, a prevailing “political” versus an “ethno-national” one. Generally, one can distinguish two main practices used by states in auto- matically ascribing citizenship at birth to their subjects: one applied in typi- cal immigrant-receiving countries such as the US and the United Kingdom, which grants citizenship to all inhabitants born in the country, on the basis of the jus soli principle (Latin for “right of the soil”), following the Anglo-Saxon legislative tradition; and a second applied by most European countries, which ascribes citizenship at birth to descendants of citizens, according to the principle of jus sanguinis (Latin for “right of blood”), deriving from the traditions of Roman law. In a detailed analysis of the political consequences of the two legal techniques for ascribing state citizenship, Rogers W. Brubaker observes that nation-states have typically employed the jus sanguinis principle, since it has been assumed that loyalty to the state is better secured by blood belonging to an “imagined” national community of descent than by simply being born in a certain territory.2 Nevertheless, with regard to naturalization policy, Brubaker further distinguishes between two legislative models of nation-state citizenship. First, there is a “state-national” legal system, which is based on the jus sanguinis principle but supplements it with a jus soli policy of naturalization.3 In

1 Brubaker, “Immigration, Citizenship,” 379–407. 2 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 123. 3 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 122–125.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401112_007 196 Chapter 5 the long run, the practical result of this policy is equivalent to the effects of jus soli citizenship legislation, namely access to full state citizenship for second- generation immigrants. Based on the paradigmatic case of France, Brubaker asserts that a nation-state tends to practice a mixture of jus soli and jus sanguinis as governing principles in its citizenship policy. Second, Brubaker identifies an “ethno-national” model of citizenship, which is based exclusively on jus sanguinis and rejects the jus soli principle, since it attempts to create an ethno-cultural community, disconnected from the in- stitutional and territorial framework of the state. German legislation is usu- ally regarded as an illustrative example of this, since in the modern period, merely being born on German territory did not confer, in itself, any legal rights to German citizenship.4 On this basis, Brubaker juxtaposes two “opposing” models of citizenship: the French one, which is liberal, “state-centered,” “secu- lar,” and “assimilationist,” and the German one, which is Romanticist, “Volk- centered” and “differentialist.”5 Their features were shaped by the divergent historical experience and geopolitical position of the two countries: in France, confidence in the power of assimilation led to the acceptance of the jus soli principle as a complementary criterion in ascribing citizenship; in Germany, where skepticism toward assimilation prevailed, an exclusive jus sanguinis citizenship legislation was adopted, mainly as protection against unwanted immigrants.6

4 For a detailed discussion of the relationship between jus soli and jus sanguinis principles in the French and German legal systems, see Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 31–33; and Rogers W. Brubaker, ed., “Citizenship and Naturalization: Policies and Politics,” in Rogers W. Brubaker, ed., Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (New York, London: Lantham, 1989), 99–128. 5 See Brubaker, “Immigration, Citizenship”; and Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood. For a classical but largely “essentializing” perspective on the difference between German and French nationalisms, see Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967). For a more recent conceptualization of a “German versus French” dichotomy of political ideologies, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 278, 358. 6 See Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, esp. 1–17. More recent works on citizenship relativ- ized the dichotomy between French and German citizenship legislation. Andreas K. Fahrmeir pointed out that, prior to the 1913 Citizenship Act, German citizenship legislation included a strong jus soli component. The adoption of jus sanguinis as the exclusive principle in ascribing citizenship in the Wilhelmine Empire thus appears as “a new departure rather than a traditional German concept of nationality.” See Andreas K. Fahrmeir, “Nineteenth-Century German Citizenship: A Reconsideration,” Historical Journal 10 (1997) 3: 721–752, 721. For a cri- tique of Brubaker with reference to the twentieth century, see Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen, 17–19, 29. In line with these authors, this book does not treat the French and German citizenship laws as “perfect opposites.” My analysis employs the two ideal-type legal- political models, the state-national and ethno-national, as analytical reference points. The