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1 Y.B. Islamic & Middle E. L. 47 (1994)
Imagined Communities Legislated: Nationalism and the Law of Nationality in Syria and Egypt

handle is hein.journals/yislamie1 and id is 65 raw text is: Imagined Communities Legislated: Nationalism and the Law of Nationality in Syria and Egypt Eberhard Kienle * Even states which are not democratically legitimated and therefore cannot claim to be the management committees of sovereign peoples tend to estab- lish special relationships with parts of their population, Depending on the balance of rights and duties, these parts of the population may be identified as subjects or citizens of the state. Usually thought of as the majority of a state's population, they may, as in the case of Kuwait, constitute a numer- ical minority. In any case, however, membership in this sometimes only marginally privileged group of people is regulated and policed by special legislation. Depending on the features sought to be emphasized, such legislation may be termed either the law of citizenship or the law of nationality. As argued below, this latter term seems to be more appropriate to the cases discussed in this contribution, even though it is not necessarily consistent with our Renanian definition of the nation as a community of loyalty; in the following, therefore, individuals will be referred to as nationals if they enjoy a certain status within the state, whether they belong to a particular nation or not. Since most states claim to represent nations, the rights of citizenship are normally only conferred upon the members of the nation; on the other hand, these rights should then be conferred upon all members. There is no difficulty in treating as citizens those members of the nation who live within the bound- aries of the state and therefore are subject to the means of physical coercion in possession of and monopolized by the state. However, difficulties arise with respect to those members of the nation who live outside the state boundaries. In other words, where nations spill over the boundaries of states, the state apparatus is not in a position to either empower or conscript and tax all individuals who belong to the nation. *Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. 47

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