The Instrumental Turn of Citizenship

Instrumentalism is the heart of an inevitable lightening of citizenship in liberal societies. Three cases of instrumentalism are discussed and compared: the selling of citizenship, expanding provisions of external citizenship, and the evolving European Union citizenship as a citizenship without duties. While the instrumental turn tends to be deplored, even counteracted, by the very states that reinforce the trend, and is criticized by some normative theorists, it is deeply grounded in the thinning of public morality and the advancing of legal individualism in liberal societies.