As citizens of any state, we are subject to a social contract. This is a concept that has been explored again and again in political philosophy, starting in ancient times. Because it is understood that people cannot live alone and disconnected, but require the protection of a larger social entity, the state, individuals willingly give up a portion of their freedom in order to belong. Belonging to a state confers both rights and obligations. In the modern era, this belonging is formalized in the concept of citizenship.
Of course, citizenship, in today’s world, is hardly the simple matter that it would have been at a time when people rarely traveled, but were born, lived and died within a 50-mile radius. Socrates, choosing to go to his death rather than violate the laws of Athens, justified the choice by noting that these same laws had protected him all has life; it was an eloquent expression of the social contract over 2,000 years before the term was even coined. Yet Socrates, if living today, would have been subjected to a geographic and cultural fluidity that might very well have been a game changer, or at very least muddied the issue. Identity itself has become hybridized, and the concept of dual citizenship is but one adjustment we have made to deal with the circumstances.
That is not to say that it is a new concept in any sense. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, as the modern nation state was being born, international identities flourished, as did easy movement between borders. Over century of conflict put a damper on that, but there have been few exceptions to the desire and practice of crossing national boundaries, and forming international identities.
Different countries have different policies regarding dual citizenship, and one might say that that is their prerogative. Under the auspices of the social contract, it may appear that one’s loyalties are split if one is a citizen of two countries, diminishing the ties between individual and state. However, this may be more of a gut-level reaction than a rational one. Most individuals who hold dual citizenships do so without incident and without serious loss of identification with one of their home countries.
Perhaps refusal of dual citizenship does not necessarily tantamount to violation of human rights. However, when countries are ambivalent about their stance on the issue, or alter it to suit political circumstances of the day, that is going too far. The United States previously had a policy of disallowing dual citizenship; thus, former Americans who moved to Canada (as many did in the 1960s and 70s) and eventually attained Canadian citizenship believed that, by doing so, they had automatically renounced their American citizenship. Several decades later, in order to collect taxes from expatriate citizens, the US reversed their earlier position, declaring that those had taken on new citizenship still remained Americans.
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