In a foremost conceptual effort, we presents a conceptual map that allows tracing emerging and proposed forms of citizenship within and beyond the nation state in a comprehensive and differentiated way. We disentangle two anchor points: membership in a political community as the fundament of citizenship and the arena of political decision-making as the focal point of citizenship rights, identities and practices. For the former we differentiate between a single national community, the universal community of humankind and multiple (national) communities. For the latter we distinguish the national, supra-national and transnational arena. Our typology thus consists of nine different forms of democratic citizenship. It is used to provide a brief overview over normative proposals and empirical findings leading to the following insights: while membership in a particular national community still dominates the reality in all three political arenas, in the normative discourse it is perceived as deficient. Membership in the universal community of humankind is widely endorsed in the normative discourse, but almost nonexistent. In contrast, membership in multiple communities is not only a growing reality but also normatively promising for democratizing a transnationalizing world.
The results of our empirical study reveal that the question whether dual citizens are less loyal to their country than mono citizens can be denied. Controlling for migration-related and socio-demographic factors, our data indicate that dual citizens are more loyal in many respects than foreign residents, but there are no significant differences between dual citizens and mono citizens in their level of identification with Switzerland and political participation there. They are even more likely than mono citizens to participate in serving its interests. In addition, there is no trade-off between these forms of loyalty to the country of residence and identification and political participation in the country of descent. On the contrary, they are positively related. Transnational loyalties seem to co-exist or even to be mutually reinforcing. Thus, dual citizenship does not seem to diminish loyalty to the country of residence and countries therefore do not stand to lose anything by allowing it.
In addition, empirically growing transnationalism and normatively desired cosmopolitanism may be closely connected when considered as different elements of new forms of citizenship beyond the single nation state. Do individuals with either full (dual citizenship) or partial (foreign resident) transnational status exhibit more cosmopolitanism than mono citizens? We decode the multidimensional character of cosmopolitanism using major democratic theories: liberalism, republicanism, and communitarianism. Multivariate regression analyses of data from a survey among mono citizens, dual citizens and foreign residents in Switzerland reveal that a transnational status is associated with cosmopolitanism in a differentiated way: dual citizens and especially foreign residents are more likely than mono citizens to exhibit liberal cosmopolitanism; but only dual citizens having full political rights and opportunities in two countries are more likely to exhibit republican cosmopolitanism and only foreign residents excluded from the political community of residence are more likely to exhibit communitarian cosmopolitanism. Each group can be considered as cosmopolitan vanguards in a specific way. This study overall demonstrates the added-value of disaggregating transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.
