ABSTRACT
For a long time, citizenship has been viewed as a mechanism meant to counterbalance social inequalities.1 Western sociologists, working mostly with a nationstate frame of analysis, usually interpreted the institutionalization of citizenship as part of a sequence of social change characterizing modern, democratic societies, in which all citizens are equal before the law and in which particularities of birth such as ethnicity, status or regional origin no longer stand in the way of an individual’s social mobility. Drawing instead on recent scholarship that addresses the link between inequalities and citizenship at the global level, this chapter focuses on how membership in the political community of citizens has ensured the relative social and political inclusion of the populations of Western European nation-states, while at the same time accounting for the selective exclusion of the colonized and/or non-European populations from the same social and political rights throughout history and up to this day. As we shall see, recent developments with regard to citizenship allocation illustrate this enduring double standard: wealthy investors from certain nonWestern regions are actively encouraged to purchase European citizenship rights in an unprecedented wave of commodification of residence and citizenship requirements across Europe, while financially strained states and non-Western labour migrants face mounting criminalization, sanctions and austerity measures when attempting to access the same rights. Taken together, these mutually reinforcing dimensions of increasing global inequalities testify to the longue durée of colonially charged racial and ethnic exclusions in the history of modernity more generally, and to the coloniality of citizenship in particular.
