The plans, hatched by Sweden’s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes.
It was a hint of a broader conversation taking place in capitals around the world. As far-right and nationalist partiessteadily gainpolitical ground, analysts say that citizenship is increasingly being linked to crime, giving rise to a shift that risks creating two classes of citizens and marginalising specific communities.
The roots of these changes can be traced back partly to the early 2000s when the UK government – led at the time by Tony Blair – begancasting citizenshipas a privilege rather than a right, said Christian Joppke, a sociology professor at the University of Bern.
The UK government posited citizenship as something to be “earned”, making it harder to obtain and easier to lose. “This idea of earned citizenship is that if you do wrong, you should also be able to lose it,” said Joppke. Recent proposals put forward in countries such as Sweden, Finland andGermanyseemingly take this one step further, he added. “The new proposals now suggest that if you do any kind of serious crime, that should also allow for the possibility to withdraw citizenship – that is quite new.”
Days after Swedenannounced plansto eventually change the constitution so that people convicted of crimes like espionage or treason could be stripped of their Swedish passports, a handful of politicians in Icelandbegan callingfor similar changes for those convicted of serious crimes. Months earlier, the Dutch government saidit wasexploring the possibility of revoking citizenshipfor serious crimes that have “an antisemitic aspect”.
The concept also made a cameo in Germany’s February election after Friedrich Merz – whose centre-right CDU/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot –told the newspaper Weltit should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.
The proposal was swiftly criticised, with one political commentator pointing out that it would result in some being “Germans on probation” for their entire lives. “They can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime – and their Germanness is gone,” the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “It doesn’t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.”
Merz’s idea, she added, had laid bare the normalisation of “racist discrimination” in that, “in other words,” he was calling for remigration – the conceptlong-peddledby far-right, anti-immigrant parties and which, in Germany, calls for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with German citizenship.
For Joppke, it was little coincidence that citizenship was being reframed just as the far-right was tightening its grip on power across the continent. Instead, he described it as one of the few options for politicians on the right of the spectrum. “What can states promise? The golden age of democracy once promised two cars per family, a house, a stable job. Now all this is gone,” he said.
Instead governments had homed in on the most basic type of security: physical security. “This is the toolbox which is intimately connected to the agenda of the radical right,” he said. “And mainstream parties are just very anxious not to be outvoted by them.”
For years, governments acrossEuropehave sought to strip citizenship from those convicted of terrorism, offering a window on to how the expanded link between nationality and crime could play out.
Because international law limits governments from rendering people stateless, the proposals linking citizenship to terrorism have been largely applied to dual nationals, said Tanya Mehra, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague. “But then the question is, aren’t you making a distinction on the basis of whether someone has one or two nationalities, and thus creating different classes of citizens?”
The law leaves dual nationals vulnerable to being punished twice for the same crime, if they serve prison time and then also face having their citizenship revoked, she said. “It’s great media optics to say that you’re taking a strong stance against crime by depriving them of their nationality,” said Mehra. “But you have to really look more carefully at whether or not you’re violating their human rights.”
Her research had delved into cases of people’s citizenship being revoked over terrorism convictions, finding a small number who were then left stranded in the country that had stripped them of citizenship after the country of their other nationality refused to take them in. “That means they basically become illegal,” she said, losing their right to stay and work in the country.
The situation pushes them underground, making it easier for terrorist or criminal groups to potentially exploit them but also harder for officials to track them. “They disappear into the illegality,” she said. “You’re creating a situation that is counterproductive.”
In Denmark, where, after years of revoking citizenship for terrorism, treason and threats to the state, thelaw was expandedin 2021 to include gang-related crime, it was difficult to say whether the changes had pushed down crime levels, said Somdeep Sen, an associate professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University.
“There isn’t much out there in terms of qualitative or quantitative data that shows that individuals – otherwise keen to commit crime – have somehow been deterred by these changes,” he said.
But what was clear was that the policy had provided “legal framing” for the longstanding, xenophobic public discourse that had falsely sought to link immigration to crime. “The issue with these changes is that it perpetuates the problematic perception that ancestry and ethnicity play a role in determining criminality,” he said.
What emerged was an overly simplistic view of crime, one that overlooks the myriad ofresearchthat hasfoundnosignificant linkbetween immigration levels and crime rates across Europe.
Years afterDenmarkhad been among the first to tie citizenship to serious crimes, the impact had been sharply felt by many, said Sen.
“Already, the years of anti-immigration discourse has heightened this feeling of unwanted-ness in Denmark,” he added. “And such laws remind many of how tenuous their inclusion in Danish society is and how easily these ties to Denmark can be severed.”