Citizenship Denationalized
![handle is hein.journals/ijgls7 and id is 453 raw text is: Citizenship Denationalized
LINDA BOSNIAK°
INTRODUCTION
When Martha Nussbaum declared herself a citizen of the world in a
recent essay, the response by two dozen prominent intellectuals was
overwhelmingly critical.' Nussbaum's respondents had a variety of
complaints, but central among them was the charge that the very notion of
world citizenship is incoherent. For citizenship requires a formal governing
polity, her critics asserted, and clearly no such institution exists at the world
level. Short of the establishment of interplanetary relations, a world
government is unlikely to take form anytime soon. A good thing too, they
added, since such a regime would surely be a tyrannical nightmare.2
* Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School-Camden; B.A., Wesleyan University; M.A.,
University of California, Berkeley; J.D., Stanford University. I have benefitted from helpful
comments by many people on earlier versions of this Article. Thanks to Alex Aleinikoff, Bonnie
Honig, Jeff Rubin, Saskia Sassen, Peter Schuck, David Scobey, Peter Spiro, Leti Volpe and Ari
Zolberg, and to participants in workshops and colloquia at the American Bar Foundation, the Center
For the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, the Cardozo Law School, the New School For
Social Research, and Rutgers Law School. Thanks also to participants in the 1999 Carnegie
Foundation For International Peace Conference, Citizenship: Comparison and Perspectives, and
to members of the New York Immigration Law Professor's Reading Group. Sonia Kim and Swati
Kothari provided excellent research assistance. I am grateful to the Center For the Critical Analysis
of Contemporary Culture (CCACC) at Rutgers University for support during a stimulating fellowship
year.
I. See Martha Nussbaum, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, BOSTON REV., Oct.-Nov. 1994,
reprinted in FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY: DEBATING THE LIMITS OF PATRIOTISM (Joshua Cohen ed.,
1996) (containing Nussbaum's essay and eleven of the original replies) [hereinafter FOR LOVE OF
COUNTRY].
2. See, e.g., Amy Gutmann, Democratic Citizenship, in FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY, supra note
I, at 66, 68 (We can truly be citizens of the world only if there is a world polity. Given what we
now know, a world polity could only exist in tyrannical form.); Michael Walzer, Spheres of
Affection, in FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY, supra note I, at 125 (I am not a citizen of the world, as she
[Nussbaum] would like me to be. I am not even aware that there is a world such that one could be
a citizen of it. No one has ever offered me citizenship, or described the naturalization process, or
enlisted me in the world's institutional structures, or given me an account of its decision procedures
(I hope they are democratic), or provided me with a list of the benefits and obligations of
citizenship, or shown me the world's calendar and the common celebrations and commemorations
of its citizens.); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism, in FOR LOVE OF
COUNTRY, supra note 1, at 72, 74 (Nussbaum speaks of 'the world citizen' and 'world citizenship,'
terms that have little meaning except in the context of a state.); but see Amartya Sen, Humanity](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ijgls7&div=24&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Citizenship Denationalized
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