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Abstract
In a country with a history of conflict, Lebanese not only have long sought emigration as a means of improving their safety and prosperity but also have sought out second passports as ‘safeguards’ to be used when things got rough at home. Little has been done on how Lebanese view these ‘second passports’ and the actual citizenship that comes with them. This article seeks to tackle this topic through analysing interviews of 10 Lebanese citizens who also hold European citizenship through naturalisation. How these Lebanese view their European citizenships will be described before turning to discussion of how this may affect the understandings of citizenship in Europe. The article concludes by looking on how the understandings of citizenship in liberal democracies in Europe on the part of citizens who normally reside outside of the state and who obtain citizenship as a ‘safety’ option may affect the broader understandings of citizenship in these countries.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was made possible by funding from the Lebanese American University.
Notes
1. Names of all interviewees have been changed in order to afford them greater freedom to say what they think.
2. The discussion will only focus on ‘liberal democracies’ as the differences in how citizenship is conceived of in other systems differs significantly. One could even go so far as to say that in many, if not all, non-democratic systems, the citizen qua citizen does not exist. The inclusion of ‘liberal’ is also purposeful in order to differentiate between systems – liberal democracies such as France, Canada and Argentina and illiberal democracies such as Russia, Peru and the Philippines (see Zakaria Citation1997).
3. For much of the modern nation-state era, citizenship was patrilineal and thus when women married, they forfeited their citizenship of birth and took on that of their husband. Minors – in a similar category to women and wives – were given the citizenship of their fathers. Today, few countries worldwide still solely follow citizenship via patrilineal descent – one of these is Lebanon (see Joseph Citation1997).
4. They are Alawite, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Coptic, Druze, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Isma'ili, Jewish, Maronite, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Sunni, Shi'a, Syrian Catholic and Syrian Orthodox.
5. This was confirmed to the author by the local mukhtar. Translated as ‘mayor’, the mukhtar is in reality the lowest level civil servant who deals with all official personal and family identification papers, for example, Tazkarat Al Hawiya (personal ID). The mukhtar is an elected official.
6. While I do not have the space to get into this discussion here, by ‘social’ I mean, protection from ethnic and/or religious discrimination in the adopted European country. While the rule of law will of course offer some basic protections, actual integration into the society is never assured (see Ireland Citation2004, among others). This is related as well to ‘national belonging’ which is discussed elsewhere in the article.
7. Switzerland banned the construction of minarets and the public call to prayer through referendum in 2010.
8. As an aside, a joke currently circulating in Lebanon is the following: How do we know that Adam and Eve were really Lebanese? They lived in a place with no government and no electricity and yet they thought they were in paradise.
9. Immigrant visas in Europe vary tremendously. The EU has recently rolled out the BlueCard as a means of unifying immigrant visa regimes in the union as well as to compete with America's hugely popular and successful Green Card program for attracting skilled immigrants.
10. One anonymous reviewer recommended a category of ‘mercantile citizenship’, noting the emphasis on financial considerations as key to why the second citizenship was obtained. This economic focus is appreciated by the author.
11. See The economist debate on immigration [online]. Available from: http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/730 [Accessed 1 October 2011] and Boeri, T. It is migration, stupid, VOX [online], 23 June 2009. Available from: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3688 [Accessed 6 October 2011], among many others.