Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

era and the concept of free citizens, 177 which is also the reason for its widespread distribution on the Old Continent as they were the very French revolutionaries that would burn anything mediaeval and return to the ideals of antiquity. Ius sanguinis hence, firstly in the modern period, occurred in the Civil Code of the French Republic of 1803; P. Weil states that ‘[t]he grant of French nationality at birth only to a child born to a French father, either in France or abroad, was not ethnically motivated. It was the first step in the creation of a modern independent citizen — no longer a permanent property of the Sovereign on whose soil he was born, but now a subject of rights.’ 178 Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars, ius sanguinis has spread all over the countries of the Continent and ingrained in their legal orders; therefore, it became the foremost way to acquire a nationality there. The rationale behind this may primarily be to preserve a community or a nation through bloodlines and family ties and their links to a state from an intergenerational perspective. Furthermore, the preservation might even transcend national borders, and lineage may therefore continue abroad. 179 On the contrary, here appears ius soli — acquiring nationality after the birthplace territory; the principle that might be, on the one hand, perceived as a relic of times bygone, in the form of the serfdom — a feudal link between a serf and the soil, respectively, the monarch. 180 Since the, legal, ideals of the French Revolution did not particularly spread over the United Kingdom, ius soli became the rule of acquisition ex lege in most of the British colonies, hence, of future Americas. 181 There comes the other hand for barely could be the utilisation of ius soli in the New World interpreted as the instrument of feudal oppression; instead, it thus developed into a symbol of freedom and hope that the next generation 178 Patrick Weil, ‘From conditional to secured and sovereign: The new strategic link between the citizen and the nation-state in a globalized world’ (2011) 9/3 International Journal of Constitutional Law 617 accessed 5 th May 2023. 179 Different states have different provisions regarding how far the lineage can continue — some impose a maximum of generations, while others do not. To that effect, see Ashley ManthaHollands and Jelena Dzankic, ‘Ties that bind and unbind: charting the boundaries of European Union citizenship’ (2022) 49/9 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2093−2094. 180 Ibid. 181 Patrick Weil, ‘From conditional to secured and sovereign: The new strategic link between the citizen and the nation-state in a globalized world’ (2011) 9/3 International Journal of Constitutional Law 618. 177 To that effect, see Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (The University of North Carolina Press 1992) 3−82.

46