Nationality as a stigma: the drawbacks of nationality (what do I have to do with book-burners?)

Abstract

The study deals with two related issues: first with the conundrum of the Hungarian law on nationality and voting rights; second with instances when nationality acts as a stigma. It has two major propositions. First, the Hungarian law on nationality and elections does not lead to any reasonable conclusion concerning who constitutes the Hungarian political community, as millions of Hungarian nationals are practically excluded – but an ever increasing crowd of people who have never lived in Hungary but are descendants of nationals of the Hungarian Kingdom (and who are therefore entitled to preferential naturalization and rewarded with voting rights), are. So a clearly ethnic-cultural nationalist discourse has led to the adoption of a system of rules which in essence serves one purpose: the creation of a faithful clientele. Second, nationality in the present form, usually based on ius sanguinis and ius soli is not tenable from the moral- and political-philosophical point of view as it does not differ from a feudal privilege, also determined by accident of birth into a family or in one place. The specific burdens that differentiate nationals from settled foreigners are also reviewed in this paper. The conclusion is that nationality should be reformulated along the lines of Rainer Bauböck and Ayelet Shachar’s thinking; that is, rights entailed in nationality should derive from attachment to a given community, and from the fact that the decisions of the body politic directly affect the person.