By Paladia Ziss.
Naturalisation is usually seen as a process by which migrants access the rights, duties and passport of their country of residence. They may feel that they belong there and want to be able to stay, have a say in its politics or access better jobs. States also have interests in naturalising migrants, usually because they bring skills or wealth, or because they are already considered part of a nation. In my initial research with Syrian refugees living across Turkey and Germany, however, naturalisation does not seem to be predominantly about the relationship between a state and a person. Instead, in the changing context of the Middle East, citizenship and naturalisation seems increasingly about navigating politics, travel and territory across multiple states – that is, about geopolitics.
Since 2011, about six million Syrians have been forced to flee the dictatorial regime of Bashar Al-Assad, his brutal crackdown against an uprising and a violent civil war. Most settled in Turkey and Germany. Although most of these continue to hold a temporary legal status, many have tried to naturalise in order to access rights they were denied by their own state. About 500,000 Syrians have become dual German-Syrian or Syrian-Turkish citizens. Holding citizenship of their country of residence is a way to feel more protected against rising anti-migrant sentiment and threats of mass deportation by right-wing pundits. In Frankfurt in 2021 Youssef, originally from Latakia, had just filed his citizenship application when he told me: ‘With the war in Syria, I know how quickly politics can change. At least with citizenship they won’t be able to kick me out.’
With a Syrian passport, which was expensive and hard to get, the refugees I spoke to could rarely travel to see family in other states. The German and (although less so) Turkish passports helped with that.
But research participants also felt ambivalent about their new citizenship. They were often disappointed that, as dual citizens, they still faced racism and discrimination. Citizenship to them was not only about their own relationship to one nation-state. It was also about whether and how they could share lives with family and friends spread out across many different geographies. Dual citizens were even more aware that most Syrians could not travel or use their rights in a context where citizenship, more than anything else, determines life chances and status. Some felt that citizenship stuck them to a territory they had not chosen. Especially for Turkish-Syrians, citizenship meant they would probably never move elsewhere but settle in Turkey, a state in repeated economic crisis and political turmoil. For all, citizenship was embedded in their social networks across Germany, Turkey and Syria.
On 8 December 2024, Assad’s regime was overthrown, changing the lives of the Syrian diaspora overnight. Many Syrians have been trying to return to Syria. They want to visit family: parents or grandparents they have not seen in years, or siblings, nephews and nieces they have never met. They want to check up on their cities and homes, often reduced to mere rubble. Many want to participate in the rebuilding of their country. Again, however, citizenship divides opportunities. Syrians with a second passport can travel and return to their country of residence. Those with temporary refugee papers risk losing their status if they do. The security, economic and political situation in Syria remains fragile and permanent return is risky.
Meanwhile, Syrians have pointed out to me that it is not only them who are using their national citizenship for global purposes. Their states of residence are starting to do so too.
Taha, a naturalised citizen of Turkey originally from Deir Az-Zor in Syria, told me: ‘The Turkish state’s plan is to naturalize 1.5 million Syrians as a belt in the southern region.’ He thinks that giving citizenship to Syrians is one way through which Turkey seeks influence in Syria. It is not clear whether this will actually happen. Naturalisation for Syrians is granted on exceptional grounds. There are no official statistics and the Turkish government hasn’t updated the number of accepted Syrian citizenship applications for more than a year. Yet, for Syrians, naturalisation is part of a pattern that Yassin al Haj Saleh has called ‘liquid imperialism’ to describe the overlapping and opaque military, economic and political ways in which states such as Turkey, Russia, Iran and the US have shaped the Syrian civil war and denied Syrians self-determination. These practices echo older, imperial conceptions of membership that were not about democratic participation, national belonging or rights, but rather about competition for population to secure labour and territory.
Back in Germany, citizenship is also changing from a national to a global institution. The new citizenship law of 2024 requires applicants to abide to the German constitution or values, however vaguely defined. Following a late addition during the parliamentary process, however, it also requires citizens-to-be to swear to commit to the ‘prohibition against waging a war of aggression’ – shorthand for condemning the Russian war on Ukraine – and ‘Germany’s special historical responsibility for the unjust National Socialist regime and its consequences, in particular for the protection of Jewish life’ – relating to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
In short, both migrants and states increasingly use citizenship not only to access or regulate national belonging but also to navigate a changing geopolitical world order. These insights point to complicated questions about the changing struggles between citizenship, nationality, territory and the state. How do states employ the institution of citizenship not only for domestic benefit but also for global power? How is this embedded in imperial histories? How do citizens and citizens-to-be use multiple citizenships to negotiate the global hierarchy of passports? What do these practices do to the institution of citizenship itself, which is mostly still understood as membership in a nation-state? The case of Syrians naturalising across Germany and Turkey in the contexts of the transformations of the Middle East shows that we need to rethink what citizenship is and does in the 21st century, beyond membership in and to a nation-state territory.