Double Nationality in the EU: An Argument for Tolerance

Abstract

Currently the Member States’ nationalities, short of being abolished in the legal sense, mostly serve as access points to the status of EU citizenship. Besides, they provide their owners with a limited number of specific rights in deviation from the general principle of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality and – what is probably more important for the majority of their owners – trigger legalized discrimination in the wholly internal situations. Viewed in this light, the requirement to have only one Member State’s nationality enforced in national law by ten Member States seems totally outdated and misplaced. This paper focuses on the legal analysis of this controversial requirement. This paper, first presented at the bi-annual EUSA conference in Los Angeles in April 2009 is forthcoming in the European Law Journal in 2011.

Keywords: EU, Citizenship, Nationality, Dual citizenship, double nationality, identity, law