Exclusion through Citizenship and the Double Standards of Modernity/Coloniality

Drawing on recent scholarship that addresses the link between inequalities and citizenship at the global level, the paper focuses on how membership in the national communities of citizens has ensured the relative social and political inclusion of the populations of Western European nation-states, while at the same time accounting for the selective exclusion of the colonized and/or non-European populations from the same social and political rights throughout history and up to this day. Recent developments with regard to citizenship allocation are used as an illustration of this enduring double standard: On the one hand, wealthy investors from certain non-Western regions are actively encouraged to purchase European citizenship rights in an unprecedented wave of commodification of residence and citizenship requirements across Europe. On the other hand, financially strained states and non-Western labour migrants face mounting criminalisation, sanctions, and austerity measures when attempting to access the same rights. The paper argues that, taken together, these mutually reinforcing dimensions of increasing global inequalities testify to the longue durée of colonially charged racial and ethnic exclusions in the history of modernity more generally, and to the coloniality of citizenship in particular.