This conversation was originally recorded as part of the podcast series Who do we think we are? (whodowethinkweare.org), produced and presented by Michaela Benson. You can listen to the full episode featuring this conversation at the podcast website.¹

Michaela Benson [MBe]: I first came across your research on citizenship at a workshop in Toronto where you were talking about investment citizenship. What really excited me about your approach was the deep historical perspective it offered. It has really stuck with me how you used this to make visible the inequalities at the heart of citizenship, how this is gendered, and how we could trace this to the development of national citizenships.

Manuela Boatcă [MBo]: Thank you so much for picking that up. This was developed in my work with Julia Roth (Boatcă and Roth 2016). Our research uncovered that wealthy investors who buy a second passport are predominantly men. These investment citizenship programs commodify citizenship. Accessing a Western passport through these programs grants visa-free access to the vast majority of countries in the world. It can thus be understood as a ticket to global social mobility. In contrast, the opportunities available to women, LBGTQ individuals, and racial minorities in order that they can escape the limitations of the citizenship that they receive at birth are rare, especially when they are born in a poor country. Instead, they resort to different ways of negotiating their access to mobility, and they do so through their bodies. Sometimes that means they resort to sex work to gain access to resources or to travel. Other times, they might seek marriage arrangements with the promise of residence or citizenship with a view to just migrating internationally to a wealthier country. In other cases, they resort to giving birth in a wealthy country that has assigned citizenship through birthright so that they themselves do not get a better citizenship or global mobility, but their child does, deferring mobility to the next generation.

What Julia and I did was to juxtapose what we called monetized social mobility—that is, wealthy investors who can just issue a check—to what we called embodied social mobility of women and feminized others. Because it involves the body, such embodied social mobility involves more precarious means and yields more precarious results, making those who resort to such practices more vulnerable.

MBe: Your explanation makes clear the work that goes into navigating the contemporary global citizenship regime, if you are already in that position which is a “gendered other” in the citizenship regime, but I wondered if you could expand on your reflections about how gendered inequality has been at the heart of citizenship right from the outset.

MBo: That's a crucial point. Citizenship as an institution is mainly traced back to the French Revolution as something that bestowed equality to the world. But if we think about it historically, citizenship rights were only granted to men who could read, write, and owned property. Their ability to pay taxes and military tribute was seen as their contribution to the maintenance of social order, qualifying them as active citizens. This legal category was counterposed to that of passive citizens with no political rights: women, foreigners, or children. A few years after the French Revolution, the constitution was amended to extend active citizenship to unpropertied adult males. Women were left to derive their membership in the community from their relationship to men. Even that is usually dismissed as a history that we have long overcome, but today citizenship and gender are still statuses ascribed at birth. They remain the most decisive factors that account for extreme inequalities between individuals in rich and poor countries. For example, for a girl born today in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, the chances to survive to age five, to have access to clean water, or to get an education are incomparably lower than for a baby, regardless of gender, born at the same time in Canada where chances for boys and girls on all these counts are nearly identically high, where there is much better infrastructure, resources, and greater opportunities awarded by citizenship. We are not that far from that unequal situation centuries ago.

MBe: What you have drawn out there is how at the outset there were citizens and classed and gendered “Others.” This has important implications for how we think about things today. From your point of view, where does it leave us in thinking about citizenship?

MBo: Both inside and outside the West, citizenship rights were granted to women only gradually, while men and women of non-Western or non-European regions were engendered along colonial lines. For instance, when we look at the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, where the revolution of the enslaved led by Toussaint Louverture resulted in the abolition of slavery, the criterion for granting citizenship was very different from the one in France. It wasn't property, literacy, or paying military tribute that counted. Race took precedence over property as a criterion for granting citizenship.

Not all whites in Saint-Domingue were property owners, while in contrast many free mixed-race individuals were. The French Colonial Assembly included unpropertied whites in the right to vote. This happened before it was possible in continental France, so the colonies were kind of in the avant-garde, more progressive than the metropole. But at the same time, the French Colonial Assembly excluded both enslaved peoples and mixed-race people. The argument put forward by white planters but also by poor whites, at the close of the eighteenth century was that enslaved people and racially mixed people were not part of the nation and could not become citizens. This idea of the French nation being both tied to whiteness, and with it an idea of civilization and freedom, was from the onset colonially-inflected.

Such logic attests to coloniality—the long-term, ongoing effects of colonial power—out of which the institution of citizenship emerged. It was possible to proclaim freedom, equality, and citizenship in continental France because its effects were still very much felt in the colonies. In this way, those who are racialized as non-white were, by definition, outside the political community of the nation. This is just one example of how the history and discourse of modernity in Western Europe were premised on enforcing and reinforcing colonial relations in the overseas possessions, with citizenship as an institution being instrumental within this process.

We can see another articulation of this when we turn towards the definition of national citizenship after Latin American countries became independent. Here, the emergence of citizenship went hand in hand with the invention of an “Other” within, a way of classifying somebody who, while part of the nation, is a “lesser” part. The leaders of South American independence movements variously defined who should be the subject of rights in the European tradition in ways that excluded indigenous and black populations.

When we see citizenship through the lens of those excluded and racialized through such colonial relations, we understand that the emergence of citizenship rights is not just the result of modernity, industrialization, the French and American Revolutions, but also inextricable from colonialism, the institution of chattel slavery, and the reconceptualization of freedom and equality undertaken in the Haitian Revolution of the enslaved. I refer to this as coloniality of citizenship to point to the fact that these exclusions hark back to very entrenched colonial structures activated or revived when such exclusions are required by the colonizer, oppressor, or dominant group (Boatcă 2021a).

MBe: I've found the coloniality of citizenship useful for advancing understandings of the UK's post-Brexit citizenship and migration regime. It offers a perspective onto the enduring colonial ties between the UK and its former colonial citizens in the present-day, most visible in the provisions extended to the people of Hong Kong and the Chagos Islands—its former colonial citizens—through changes in nationality and immigration legislation (Benson 2021, 2022).

You've made clear that defining who is the subject of the political community, whether that is a colonial, imperial, or national community, is also about saying who shouldn't have access to rights, who we would like to keep out. This makes evident that we need to ask the question: Who is the institution of citizenship not so good for? But to your mind, how does this conceptualization change understandings of citizenship?

MBo: The story we're told about citizenship through textbooks is that citizenship emerged as a mechanism of inclusion, one that would equalize socio-economic disparities and especially the particularities of birth (see for example Marshall 1950). The idea was that, with the emergence of citizenship as a modern institution, all citizens are equal before the law. In consequence, your ethnicity, your race, your gender would play an ever-smaller part in deciding about your life chances and social mobility. But this is only half of the story.

When I discuss this with students, I ask them to picture those gestalt images where, depending on what you focus on, you can see either two people facing each other or a vase. The idea is that citizenship is both pictures, both the black and the white, both the object and the two people, because exclusion is just as present as inclusion. Citizenship in the national context did very much provide rights, did gradually make citizens more or less equal before the law. However, from a global perspective, citizenship functioned as a mechanism of exclusion along lines of race, class, and gender from the moment it emerged. It was designed to do so.

One of the first conceptualizations of this was provided by Rogers Brubaker when he said, “Citizenship is internally inclusive, that means it extends rights to all those defined as citizens and at the same time it is externally exclusive because it restricts the access of non-citizens to the same rights” (Brubaker 1992: 21). Both parts of the picture are there, it just depends on what we focus on. Scholarship has tended to focus only on the equalizing part, but if we look again at the invention of the national citizen, it went hand in hand with the invention of the foreigner, someone who is not a citizen and thus excluded from the rights awarded to citizens.

MBe: I wanted to turn now to how you have extended this understanding to thinking about the making of Europe. And in doing this you have turned to the Caribbean and the continuing statuses of people in that region through the concept of colonial citizenship. What does this help to make visible?

MBo: For me, the Caribbean is a very good lens for looking at some longstanding global relations. Sidney Mintz (1998) once said that the world has now become a macrocosm of what the Caribbean was in the sixteenth century; it was highly multi-lingual, multi-confessional, and a crucible of migrations. In the present, it is the region with the longest history of colonial entanglements with Europe; it is both the oldest region colonized by Europe and the region that has been colonized the longest because it still contains colonized territories today. If you want to look at an institution such as citizenship, which I consider a colonial institution, it is crucial to look at the Caribbean. Not only was it, as a region, the main site of the genocide of indigenous peoples, of the massive influx of enslaved Africans, but it also provided resources and labor to Europe through the plantation economy and later through the labor migrants who rebuilt the post-war economies in Western Europe and the United States. All of these waves of labor migration and exclusions had to do with negotiations for citizenship.

In the present, there is a dialectic of citizenship in the Caribbean. On the one hand, there is the commodification of citizenship rights in those Caribbean states that used to be colonized, and on the other hand we have colonial citizenship that persists in those Caribbean territories that are still under European and US occupation. That is how the region captures the dialectics of modernity and coloniality today.

To make it more concrete: there are still dependent—I prefer to call them “colonized”—Caribbean areas today, such as Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, or Martinique as well as the British Virgin Islands, among others. Nationals of some of these territories use their United States or European Union citizenship to migrate from the colony to the metropole and for global mobility. Yet as such, this possibility is a colonial loophole which at the same time undermines independence efforts, because people would not willingly renounce the advantages awarded by a strong passport in exchange for what Caribbean scholars have called “flag independence,” where you just have a flag and a national day to celebrate, but you no longer have global mobility because your passport grants you very limited travel options (see for example Knight and Palmer 1989; Lewis 2013).

We also have independent Caribbean territories such as St. Kitts & Nevis, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, Grenada, St. Lucia, all of which have used their Commonwealth citizenships as a development strategy. Investors with weaker passports take the opportunity to acquire the citizenship of these territories and with it acquire mobility in return for investment in the island economy. This is a gain in mobility for wealthy, overwhelmingly male, but non-Western investors who might otherwise struggle to be globally mobile. In the case of St. Kitts & Nevis and Dominica, these so-called “investment citizenships” were initiated following independence, and the programs were revamped and taken up by other independent Caribbean states after the 2008 financial crisis, because their development strategies became strategically important. After the economically devastating 2017 hurricanes, selling citizenship to investors was a strategy pursued by more independent states.

What this shows is that in the Caribbean as a region, there are both independent states that use the colonial remnants of their citizenship and colonial citizenships in those still colonized territories that diminish efforts for independence in return for mobility advantages.

MBe: That draws out very clearly that sense of what the trade-offs are for these countries that still have some dependence and trade relations with their original colonizers, and the challenges that they are facing in thinking about how they would be repositioned on the world stage if they sever those ties. That discussion around investment citizenship, which is one that I have been thinking about in respect to my research with North Americans in Panama, really points to the global political economy in citizenship and migration, which might otherwise slip from view when you focus on national citizenship (Benson and O'Reilly 2018). Basically, if you stop seeing these provisions within the context of the world system, or global political economy of migration and citizenship, you miss part of the picture.

MBo: Indeed. When we look at the place of origin of these investors globally, mostly they come from semi-peripheries. Chinese, Russian, Lebanese, and Brazilian investors have been at the forefront of investment citizenship. For some, getting a Caribbean passport is just a first step towards getting a US green card, tiding them over to a better goal. But it is a complicated strategy of ensuring global mobility.

MBe: This kind of strategizing is in part a response to the turbulence of some citizenships, the impermanence of the rights that they actually permit, and the limitations and restrictions that they place on people's movements, as well as, of course, civil unrest in lots of parts of the world. You've expanded your work on the dialectics of citizenship in the Caribbean to think about what's happened in the Caribbean interplays with European state formation (Boatcă 2021b). One of the things that really captured my attention within this work was thinking with the idea of “Forgotten Europe.” I'd be interested to hear a little more about your entry points into this.

MBo: Thank you so much for asking that question, it is really dear to me. The idea of “Forgotten Europe” is closely related to my own epistemic positioning and intellectual trajectory. I am a Romanian citizen, now also a German citizen, who migrated to Germany to study sociology 25 years ago. Growing up in Bucharest in a lower middle-class family, I was raised to consider myself as European, and with the privilege of not having to consider whether I was white. It was just not a question that one would even ask—especially under state socialism—though there was an implicit understanding that there is local non-white population made up by the Roma from which majority Romanians differed. But migrating to Germany in the years preceding the so-called Eastern Enlargement of the European Union, I witnessed how Europeanness was gradually being narrowed down to European Union citizenship and with it, the whiteness of Europe's Eastern and Southern citizens was being increasingly questioned. All of a sudden, it was no longer clear that I was European or I was unquestionably white. It was from that position that I became interested in where that discourse about the European Union located Eastern Europe.

As a community of values, the European Union reinforced hierarchies between what I call multiple and unequal Europes. These inequalities in Europe and the types of unequal Europes they generated resulted from the shift in hegemony between different European colonial powers, but they still have effects today. For a long time, I focused on how, around the eighteenth century particularly, France and England had emerged as a self-proclaimed “heroic Europe” that produced modernities and made revolutions, also at the same time relegating the previous colonizers, Spain and Portugal, to the status of the “decadent Europe” that had declined from hegemony and from imperial splendor while relegating the European East to some epigone perpetually catching up with the West, that I called “epigonal” Europe.

MBe: I think that shows how Europe is not homogenous even in the minds of the Europeans, or the people who think they are Europeans, and how some people are classed as more European than others. Quite often those “unequal Europes” that you have spoken and written about are overlooked (Boatcă 2021b).

MBo: Reflecting on this, I realized that looking at the construction and the discourse of the European Union from one of the “unequal Europes,” from the excluded or “denigrated” East, offered a critical lens that could shed a different light on Europe. But I also understood that, by focusing on that critical edge, I was being complicit in invisibilizing—that is, actively forgetting—other parts of Europe, namely Europe's remaining colonial possessions. I realized that by not including them in the discussion of what it means to be European, they were being actively forgotten in terms of EU policy as well.

MBe: I think one of the things that really stands out in the description that you have just presented of your own journey of realization, is this sense of peripheralization and how forgetting was an act of European policy. Can you explain what you mean by that?

MBo: What I mean is that the act of forgetting takes place at the level of EU policy. We can see this in the way that the territories are named. They are officially labelled “Overseas Countries and Territories and Outermost Regions” but might also be referred to as Protectorates or Communities. To my mind these are placeholders for the appropriate term, “colonies.” The European Central Bank refers to the fact that some of these territories are depicted on Euro bank notes by saying, “this reflects special relations of these territories with the European Union.” “Special relations” is of course another euphemism for colonialism. Despite the formal acknowledgement that these territories are part of the EU, they are rarely part of the conversation about what it means to be European, as official EU discourse foregrounds continental Europe to the detriment of its territories acquired through colonialism. What becomes clear is that the EU discourse links European-ness to a narrowly defined physical location, excluding both the memory and the present of Europe's colonial ties to other regions. The overseas territories are “Forgotten Europe” because they are literally off the map in terms of how Europe self-represents itself, while they are at times on the map in terms of the claims made to them by continental European states.

When we hear in public discourse references to Europe's Caribbean possessions, they tend to be linked to the history of individual states, so we hear about the Dutch Caribbean, the French Antilles, the British West Indies, but we don't hear about how these places are part of Europe. The coloniality of memory that the European Union discourse promotes prevents us from finding a name, a label, an over-arching category, that would be legitimate as a reference to these territories in relation to Europe. If we don't have a reference for what are ultimately colonial outposts, we relegate an entire history and colonial present to the dustbin. This means we don't have to discuss colonial legacies and we don't have to discuss reparations; we don't have to talk about structural changes to a still persisting colonial economy. This is not only about today's situation, it is also about the role that these territories played in consolidating European economic and geo-political power, which is what led to the establishment of the EU.

MBe: And of course, this really does tie to questions that we should be asking ourselves as social scientists about methodological nationalism, including designing our research projects in ways that do not reproduce this coloniality of memory. The thing you have really clearly drawn out is that the forgetting takes place in continental Europe, but I wondered if you wanted to reflect on some of the consequences of that forgetting on the ground in those places that continental Europe has decided to forget.

MBo: The differences in status, independent of the length of colonial occupation, is also fascinating in terms of understanding how remote-controlled these territories still are, very much the colonial fashion. The rights of the overseas territories citizens and their status vary widely between British, French, Danish, and Dutch territories. For example, citizens of British Overseas Territories hold British passports. They have consular assistance, protection from UK diplomatic posts, but don't have the right to live or work in the UK, nor were they—and this is before Brexit—EU citizens. But the citizens of French overseas territories are French and EU citizens. They have the right to work and reside in the EU, but because they are not part of the Schengen zone, different visa policies apply to them. That is very important at the time when you decide about education, about mobility, about family reunification, and when it comes to voting.

During the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU, different solutions had to be found for Gibraltar and Northern Ireland, both of which had majority support for the UK to remain in the EU, and which share land borders with the EU. These discussions were very prominent in the media. Notably absent was attention to what Brexit would mean for the British Overseas Territories, whose citizens had no vote in the Referendum despite the extensive consequences on the ground. For example, Anguilla borders the Dutch and French island of Sint Maarten/St. Martin. It is dependent on them for postal services, basic medical services. Educational and special needs are accessed through the facilities located in these EU territories. As an “Internally Self-Governing British Territory,” Anguilla is ineligible for most British development aid. To date, the EU has been its main source of funding, which extensively supported reconstruction projects after the hurricanes that devastated the region. Since Brexit, Anguilla is no longer eligible for EU funding and its citizens risked losing access to specialized medical care and the postal services in the EU territories that they border. There was a real risk that, through Brexit, territories such as Anguilla would face the prospect of harboring instant refugee populations of British people of color; places such as Pitcairn, which is dependent on exporting honey, will still face a significant problem. While not the same as not accessing medical services, this is an issue not being treated as a British problem, and it was never seen as a problem for the EU to solve either, making clear the extent to which these territories truly are forgotten Europes.

MBe: What I find really inspiring about your work is how it weaves together history and contemporary global geopolitics. Before we close, I wanted to ask if there was one message that you wanted people to take away about your work on citizenship?

MBo: If I have to bring it down to one, it would be that it is a colonial institution shaped by racial and gendered exclusions.

MBe: I think that is a helpful reminder that citizenship was something that was imposed by governments, institutionalized, and has its origins in really rampant inequality, exploitation, and extraction on a global scale.