Rainer Bauböck
Compound Citizenship: Empirical and Normative Perspectives on Migrants

Citizenship is generally regarded as either an instrument or a reward for immigrant integration. Both views share common background assumptions of methodological and normative nationalism. They view migration only from the perspective of a receiving society and see citizenship as membership in a territorially bounded society of permanent residents. I suggest an alternative conceptual framework in which legal statuses and rights of migrants are jointly produced by countries of origin and destination and in which access to citizenship opens up new opportunities for free movement across international borders. This perspective allows transcending comparative studies of national citizenship regimes by focusing instead on individuals and their shifting positions within broader citizenship constellations. In a second step I will consider implications of this view for the normative principles of equality and inclusion that are at the heart of democratic citizenship and for political theory controversies about migration rights. In my conclusions I will argue that even a transnational perspective on citizenship and migration still requires fairly stable territorial polities as reference units. In a world of hypermobile societies, which is not our world for the foreseeable future, we would have to radically reinvent democratic citizenship.