Certainly, it’s not required to protect your rights. We live in a world of human rights, where slavery is outlawed, gay people can marry, and thinking for yourself (rather than obedience to authority) is valued. So why, in societies based on the ideal of equal human worth, does citizenship still exist?

Citizenship is typically justified with romantic notions—self-determination, democracy, preservation of values. But at its core, citizenship is little more than a certain legal status within a certain legal system. By defining its rights and privileges as bound to a particular state, citizenship itself violates our cherished idea of equal human worth. Instead, citizenship is most effective at upholding caste systems both within and among nations.

In most cases, citizenship is granted more or less at random, based on where your family was from, or where you were raised. Public authorities grant citizenship; the actual citizen typically has no participation in the decision. Once granted, citizenship cannot be refused—or changed before obtaining some other citizenship, without the risk of becoming a “stateless” person, deprived of the rights of citizenship anywhere in the world.

Citizenship was created to legally proclaim equality among the haves and have-nots. It did not eliminate socioeconomic inequality; it merely explained it away through the incomplete promise of “one person one vote.” This made extracting obedience from the population easier and drove nationalism. Today, even the most awful political systems boast glorified citizenships.

For most of its history, citizenship has been useful for a very ugly reason. Citizenship allows us to ignore the basic tenets of the enlightenment—the presumption that humans are equal—without real argument. It is enough to say “She is not a citizen” to justify excluding someone from rights, entitlements, and respect.

Citizenship, thus, can divide as much as it unites. We see that in the U.S. with DACA kids, the Dreamers, who are threatened with being thrown out of their home country because they lack citizenship. And America is not alone. Citizenship divides not only people within a nation, but confers unequal status based on the privileged status of some nations over others. Think of those who possess the all-entitling super-citizenships of nations of the global north, versus the limitations against people who come from former colonies—it’s clear that the status quo of citizenship is racist.

Racism is just one of the core building blocks of citizenship; sexism is another, as citizenship was routinely denied to women as well as minorities until well into the 20th century.

This map is the world rescaled so that the relative sizes of the countries express the relative sizes of their populations. The map is colored to show the “Quality of Nationality”—that is the power conferred by citizenship—in each place, with darker colors indicating higher quality citizenship. Courtesy of B.Hennig and D. Ballas.

This map is the world rescaled so that the relative sizes of the country express the relative sizes of the GDP of the countries. This map, like Map 1, is colored to show the “Quality of Nationality”—that is the power conferred by citizenship—in each place, with darker colors indicating higher quality citizenship. When you compare maps, note how closely higher GDP correlates with high quality citizenship. Courtesy of B.Hennig and D. Ballas.

Citizenship is at a crossroads now: the dominant narrative that the global equality of human beings can be assured within states is in reality eroding. Different citizenships are not equal, and the allocation of citizenship rights worldwide is neither logical nor clear.
At the macro level, citizenship enables the perpetuation of rigid pre-modern caste structures. The son of an American is an American, and the son of a brahman is a brahman. We do not ask ourselves whether this is just.

To argue for citizenship at a micro level is utterly confounding and contradictory. Being a tenured professor is irrelevant to citizenship in Germany, but was crucial to securing immediate citizenship in Austria until 2008. “Being active in the diaspora” is irrelevant to Austrians, but can make you a Pole. Having a Lebanese mother is irrelevant to Lebanese citizenship, but having a Jewish mother, even without Israeli citizenship, can make you Israeli.

Examples of this disparity in the rules of citizenship are countless: what is taken for granted as best practice in one country can seem almost outrageous in another. But the contradictions should point us to the bigger problem with citizenship: there cannot be a “worse” or a “better” method of assignment to a caste. Any caste system depends on repugnant assumptions and should be intolerable, at least in modern democracies.

All citizenships are described often as equally valuable—even though this assumption is flawed. Equality of different citizenships would only work in a world where authorities could enforce standards of self-fulfillment and personal empowerment in every country. In such a world, citizenship would provide rights, not liabilities.

And in such a glorious world, citizenship would then be irrelevant.

But we live in a world where there are Pakistanis, whose citizenship is a global liability; they must hold a visa to travel to any other country, and hold no settlement rights abroad—and also Norwegians, who enjoy countless rights at home and can settle in more than 40 of the richest democracies without any formalities. In our world, citizenships do not have equal dignity. We are treated differently according to the color of our passport, and citizenship upholds random privilege. Look from Europe across the Mediterranean, or peer from the U.S. across the wall President Trump is building, and you see a world order where punishing randomness and hypocrisy reign.

The quality of our citizenship correlates very neatly with the global distribution of wealth. Most of the world’s people are losers of what prominent scholar Ayelet Shachar called ‘the birthright lottery.’ That is because they are denied the mobility and security that comes with a passport from an economically advanced nation and got their status at random. By controlling the borders between states, citizenship is the most important tool in the world to keep it that way.

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Similarly, the World Cup fuses sport and national identity on a quadrennial basis. In both cases, media coverage transforms feats of physical prowess into stories of national triumph or defeat, and in the process recasts athletes, many of whom the larger public has never cared about previously, into national heroes and sometimes even villains.

Lost in the drama and pageantry is the question of why sports should be framed in terms of political geography at all. How is it that we have learned to see the world as a collection of countries?

A nation is a group of culturally similar people who believe they belong together and deserve to govern themselves. This way of thinking about the world, or imagining the world, begins by kindergarten, when children are taught to read basic maps and globes depicting the world as organized into a jumble of colorful, interlocking shapes demarcated by clear borders, invariably accentuated as black lines. We are taught that these borders delineate distinct peoples, societies, and environments, and dutifully memorize their locations, names, and physical features—and of course their flags—by coloring maps with crayons. Teachers emphasize knowing our own place within this political jigsaw puzzle, and, over time, we come to identify ourselves as belonging to a nation.

The staging of the Olympics and the World Cup and the teaching of geography in the intimate confines of an elementary school classroom seem worlds apart, yet both are simultaneously cause and effect to how we think of the world as a world of borders, a globe comprised of clearly partitioned, sovereign political territories. The process of nationalization, however, is much more complicated than simply putting crayons in the hands of five-year-olds. It extends beyond education to encompass most aspects of daily life, from the media and popular culture to professional and political organizations.

Today’s most pressing debates are rooted in and around notions of borders. Some focus on overturning accepted borders, such as the attempts of ISIS to establish a new caliphate across Syria and Iraq, the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to secure control over the South China Sea, or the disputes between Russia and Ukraine over eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Other debates have little to do with the location of the borders, but rather involve how borders should function and be marked or policed. President Trump’s call to build a new southern border wall funded by Mexico is a prominent example. Another is the struggle among members of the European Union to maintain open borders while simultaneously strengthening border controls along their southern and eastern peripheries—demonstrating the poignancy and power of borders in contemporary politics. For better or worse, our disparate views on belonging, migration, trade, political populism, sectarian strife, natural resource extraction, environmental sustainability, climate change, and even, of course, global sports, are filtered through the spatial paradigm of a bordered world.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. It is also one that is incomplete, inconsistent, and might ultimately prove to be transitory.

Scholars trace the origins of our modern notions of borders to Western Europe. As that region transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period, Europe was structured around a political system of mutual obligations and privileges between lords, vassals, and peasants, later known as feudalism. Lacking the ability to govern their kingdoms directly, kings granted nobles the right to administer certain areas, or fiefs, on the king’s behalf in exchange for allegiance and military service. The king retained nominal authority over the kingdom through this system of vassalage, but nobles soon gained considerable autonomy over their fiefs, including the rights of taxation and hereditary title.

Nobles repeated the basic arrangement with lesser nobles and further partitioned their estates into ever smaller fiefs, eventually creating a confused patchwork of overlapping loyalties and decentralized governance scattered across an assortment of principalities, duchies, counties, etc. In some cases, nobles held fiefs in different kingdoms and therefore nominally owed allegiance to multiple kings. The situation was further complicated by what we would today call non-governmental organizations, such as the Catholic Church, military or monastic orders, occupational guilds, and city-states. Within this feudal system, clear territorial borders were unnecessary, as long as lords and vassals honored their mutual obligations.

This decentralized system began to break down by around the 15th century for complex reasons, including the rise of capitalism and wage labor, advances in military technologies, and the growth of an urban-based merchant class. The incessant religious wars that marked the Reformation brought developments to a head, culminating in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

These treaties helped usher in the notion of territorially sovereign states, which became the foundation for the contemporary international system. Basically, these monarchs mutually recognized each other as possessing the right to exercise absolute authority over their territories free from outside interference. In theory at least, each monarch possessed absolute sovereignty over his or her territory and all the people within it.

During this transition, monarchs also began to acquire the tools to more directly exercise sovereignty, most notably standing militaries, professional bureaucracies, and systematic taxation. The grounding of state sovereignty in territory also created a need to precisely determine the territorial extent of the state. The blurry borders of the Middle Ages were incompatible with these new notions of territorial sovereignty. Aided by advances in surveying, navigation, and cartography, governments carefully mapped and marked their respective territories. Borders as we conceive of them today came into being.

The final shift occurred when royal sovereignty was replaced by popular sovereignty. The rise of nationalism as a mass social movement in the decades following the French Revolution led to the corollary idea that the political borders of the state should conform to the cultural borders of the nation. The idea of a nation-state—in which the French state should include all French people, while the German state should include all Germans—was born.

The idea of grouping culturally similar peoples within their own states makes sense in theory, but has proven impossible to put into practice without widespread forced migration and horrendous violence, as demonstrated by two World Wars, among other tragedies.

Those western notions of the nation-state, territory, and borders—and their underlying assumptions—would eventually be exported around the world by force through colonialism to form the foundation of the modern nation-state system. Still, this nation-state system contains a fundamental contradiction: The idea of territorial sovereignty exercised by states can’t always be reconciled with the right of national self-determination and sovereignty.

This leads to confusion and conflation between the terms state and nation. For example, the Charter of the United Nations simultaneously affirms its commitment to the territorial integrity of states and the right of national self-determination. The actual name of the United Nations is misleading since only states, not nations, can be members. The United Nations is actually an organization of disunited states.

Some saw the end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the growth of multinational corporations, organizations, and treaties, among other developments, as heralding an embryonic borderless world. Globalization became a buzzword. Yet because of our continued proclivity to think of most issues, from politics and economics to identity and culture, in state-centric terms, the framework of territorially sovereign nation-states marked by clearly defined, linear borders continues to exert a powerful hold over our understanding of the world and our place in it.

During this year’s winter Olympics, television commentators debated whether America’s historically low medal count in PyeongChang should be a cause of national concern. Brazil’s 7-1 World Cup loss to Germany in 2014 provoked discussion of a national identity crisis. The fact that these issues were raised in earnest demonstrates the continued power of borders to frame how we think about the world, including in such apparently trivial matters as sports.

We may live in a world of unprecedented connectivity marked by dramatically increasing flows of people, goods, technologies, and information, as well as issues like climate change, sectarian strife, demographic transitions, and economic dislocation that seem to beg for global responses, yet the world will remain a very bordered one for the foreseeable future.

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