Professor Reinhard Schweitzer (Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, Barcelona) will present his research on ancestral citizenship and immigration policy.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Haines Hall, Rm 279
Abstract: Like several other EU Member States, Austria and Spain have recently extended privileged pathways to external citizenship for descendants of the many people who had fled persecution under previous authoritarian regimes. Ancestral citizenship not only offers mobility and other key rights and opportunities for individual beneficiaries (as well as their children) but also fulfills a range of purposes for the nation-state that grants it, including intergenerational continuity and territorial or at least symbolic inclusion of people with familial ties to that particular state. This can be part of a necessarily complex and long-term process through which modern nation-states (and their populations) are trying to come to terms with their uncomfortable past. But it can also be seen as a tool for managing the future composition of a country’s population and thus function as an ethnically selective complement or even substitute for immigration policy. Based on a comparative analysis of legal documents, media coverage, and political debates around these two reforms and their ongoing implementation, this paper highlights the similarities and key differences between the Austrian and Spanish cases, questions some of the underlying interests, intentions, and official justifications, and thereby helps to explain how and why these reforms have come about. This analysis constitutes the first step of a multi-annual research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science that aims to contribute to a better understanding of, and more informed public and political debates about, the role of ancestral citizenship in and for contemporary Europe.
If you are a graduate student and you would like to join Professor Schweitzer for lunch afterwards, please email duranasaydee@ucla.edu.
Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration, Center for European and Russian Studies