ABSTRACT
The very notion of citizenship is a kind of fiction—a fabricated mix of civil, political, social, and cultural practices that circumscribe the thing we call identity. We are used to thinking that citizenship confers identity (or some part of it) by virtue of the above mix of factors. What makes a person a Finn, for example, is that convergence of factors that begins with being born of Finnish parents, probably within the borders of Finland, and all that entails in terms of future political and cultural attachments. More recently, however, a rethinking of citizenship has taken place that foregrounds a different vector of conferral: one where citizenship, for example, takes into account a pre-existing identity as the primary measure. While much of this new thinking arises from gender studies or investigations into the social and political empowerment of marginalized peoples, it is worth considering that in earlier eras citizenship was more a matter of kinship than territory. Indeed, for all the abstract constitutional and legal aspects of citizenship, the first step for many people is that, as children, they receive their citizenship status from their parents. Migration can complicate this, of course. Countries that do not, for example, grant automatic citizenship to the children of immigrants who are born on their national territory create individuals who grow up with a sense of cultural belonging but without the citizenship rights that usually attach to it. For a long time Germany was the prime Western European example of this practice.
