Who benefits from dual citizenship? The new nationality law and multicultural future of South Korea

Abstract

An individual with dual citizenship has long been regarded as “deviant” in the modern nation-state system.1 The Hague Convention on Nationality of 1930 established the principle of a single allegiance by an individual to a polity-“one nationality for one person”-in order to clarify to which state an individual owed a military obligation (Faist & Kivisto, 2007, p. 32).2 Under such a principle, a state authority reserved political, economic, social, and civil rights for its citizens, and only those who had these rights were treated as moral equals and enjoyed full securement of their interests, properties, and identities. As the world has become more and more divided and institutionalized through international law and treaties, each individual has been strongly connected to a specific nation-state. Dual citizenship has thus been perceived as an abnormal situation for the modern nation-state. However, policy makers today are starting to see dual citizenship as an opportunity to promote economic development and to solve such social problems as a declining birth rate and aging population, rather than as a threat to sovereignty and social integration.