This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Europe Programme call 2026. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
Citizenship laws are traditionally viewed as the last bastion of national sovereignty where, except for human rights norms on non-discrimination and avoiding statelessness, there is strong resistance to internationalisation. This is the case even in the European Union, where member state nationality provides access to Union citizenship, yet the competence to regulate citizenship is principally located at the level of the national state. As a result, there is a strong variation among states in how they regulate citizenship in terms of the modalities and conditions for acquisition or loss of status.
Surprisingly, the empirical claim of converging citizenship laws has never been comprehensively assessed across the wider European continent and over a larger time span. This is problematic for at least three reasons. First, in many contexts across Western Europe, the ‘opening up’ of citizenship was accompanied by the introduction of mandatory civic integration requirements. Second, with recent restrictive reforms increasing naturalisation requirements to 8 years (Finland, also proposed in Sweden) and 10 years (Portugal, also proposed in the Netherlands), we appear to witness a backsliding of liberal citizenship law. Third, many Central, East and Southern European states have consolidated their national and state projects in the post-communist period, prioritising extra-territorial inclusion of transborder ethnic kin populations and members of expatriate diasporas. These features make these regimes open to kin populations outside the states’ territories but typically mean they are not geared towards the inclusion of immigrants and their descendants. This has raised renewed concern after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent refugee flows.
To understand the dynamics of citizenship policy convergence across wider Europe, or the lack thereof, in this interdisciplinary project, we ask two related research questions (descriptive and explanatory):
- To what extent have citizenship policies converged across Europe?
- What drives policy dynamics in a domain characterized by national autonomy?
For the first question, we set our scope as widely as possible, focusing on current (and past) EU member states and associated states, and those with current (potential) EU candidacy status from Eastern, Southeastern and Southern European states. We map policy developments on contested and intersecting issues such as access to citizenship for immigrants (including for refugees and stateless persons) and their descendants, ethnic/national minorities, access to citizenship for the diaspora, and for privileged groups such as investors, as well citizenship deprivation due to dual citizenship restrictions and security concerns. The temporal scope of the analysis is 2000-2025, focusing on developments over the past twenty-five years.
To answer the second research question, our theoretical framework revolves around three key factors from the literature: the role of policy diffusion, demography and political polarisation. First, scholars have pointed to the diffusion of liberal norms in light of the extensive human rights conditionality for EU membership and norms of the European Convention on Nationality. Second, post-enlargement migration flows and low birth rates have exerted contrasting pressures in Eastern, Southeastern and Southern Europe. Third, the political polarisation of migration and the rise of anti-immigrant discourse have impacted political opportunities across the European continent, resulting in a restrictive backlash.
The project team works in close cooperation with the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT) project of the Global Governance Programme at the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.