A Review of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization by Peter J. Spiro

Professor Peter J. Spiro’s¹ book, Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization,² examines the changing nature of citizenship, specifically U.S.³ citizenship, in the face of globalization. Spiro’s analysis comes to some rather radical conclusions about the future significance of citizenship and the role of nations in international politics and everyday life. His main thesis is that the importance of U.S. citizenship is waning due to a breakdown in the traditional distinctions between U.S. citizens and the rest of the world.⁴ As the benefits conferred and duties required by U.S. citizenship become more diluted, Spiro asserts, citizenship and nationhood are increasingly anachronistic as signifiers of community in a global world.⁵ In addition, Spiro critiques the way that law defines U.S. citizenship—whether with regard to birth or territorial presence—as inaccurate and arbitrary, contributing to the decline of citizenship as an important status.⁶

The enormously ambitious nature of Spiro’s ultimate assertion—that nations will cease to be major organizational and political entities as a result of this decline—means that some of his arguments are difficult to accept and can, at times, seem hasty and conclusory. That said, his book is well reasoned and thought provoking, and many of his unique observations resonate strongly in today’s changing society.

I have chosen three of Spiro’s many interesting arguments for closer analysis in this review.⁷ First, I will examine Spiro’s critique of U.S. citizenship law, both current and historic. Second, I will turn to Spiro’s discussion of the benefits and duties attached to citizenship and their effect on citizenship as a desirable status. Finally, I will explore Spiro’s suggestions for future replacements of citizenship and nationhood as the foundations of human community.

Spiro breaks his discussion of the legal status of citizenship into two parts: citizenship by birth⁸ and citizenship through naturalization.⁹ Neither of these categories, according to Spiro, provides an accurate method for determining who is a part of the U.S. community and who is excluded.¹⁰ Citizenship by birth can be extended to someone born coincidentally to parents temporarily in the United States, who may never again return, and yet that person would remain a U.S. citizen. Moreover, a temporary resident with relatively few ties to the United States may naturalize as a citizen, while a lifelong U.S. resident may find it economically or legally impractical to do so. Spiro uses such examples of the inaccuracies of legal citizenship to support his claim that, as globalization makes travel and communication across national borders more convenient and commonplace and the U.S. community becomes more diverse and less exclusive, the importance of citizenship as a status is diminishing to a vanishing point.¹¹

In his critique of the legal definition of U.S. citizenship, one of Spiro’s main arguments is that much of what formerly set the United States apart from the rest of the world, including its culture and commitment to constitutional democracy, has become widespread due to globalization.¹² This observation works two ways. First, it means that territorial presence, once an important factor in determining cultural and communal attachment, is much less useful in the face of globalization.¹³ A person born by chance in the United States might have less of a connection with traditional U.S. culture and political philosophy than a person born in Vancouver; yet U.S. law would recognize the person born in the United States as a citizen, and not the person born in Vancouver, based purely on territorial presence. Second, it means that as U.S. political ideals spread to more and more countries and are adopted by more and more people, the attributes that make the United States unique become increasingly commonplace. As Spiro observes, “[o]nce everyone is an American, no one is an American.”¹⁴

To emphasize his point that American citizenship means less today than it used to, Spiro points to declines in the naturalization rate as a marker of...