In the first in this series of five ACE Dialogues: Going Back to Go Forward, Dr Sabrina Axster discusses how states determine who should be a member of their citizenry and the logics which drive these decisions.
How do states determine who should be a member of their citizenry, and what logics drive these decisions? In the German context, this question has predominantly been answered through an emphasis on state formation.
Through a historical case study of Germany’s 1913 citizenship act, this talk brings a different set of drivers into view. It situates the making of the 1913 act within German overseas colonialism, the territorial expansion to the European east, German mass emigration to the settler-colonies of the Americas, shifting labor and employment relations and the increase of foreign workers in the German metropole.
Mobilizing the postcolonial migration scholarship and theories of racial capitalism, the talk reveals how citizenship laws emerged as one of the tools of state power to balance the demands of racial and colonial capitalism for land, labour and resources with the desire to 'secure' the white German polity from the racial other in Europe and the colonies.
Ultimately, this shows that the making of the German citizenry is as much a story of racial and colonial capitalism as it is a story of state building.
Speaker
Dr Sabrina Axster - Regional affiliate scholar with the Migrations Program in the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.
The other webinars in the series
- More information
ACE Dialogues: Going Back to Go Forward series explores ancestral citizenship, the practice of granting citizenship based on descent or historical restitution to individuals living abroad.
At a time of shifting migration policies and reckonings with historical injustice, we will examine how this phenomenon reshapes migration and challenges conventional ideas of nationhood.
- Related links
- Ancestral Citizenship Acquisition in Europe research project