Kälin and Kochenov's Quality of Nationality Index

An Objective Ranking of the Nationalities of the World

Dimitry Kochenov, Justin Lindeboom, Dimitry Kochenov, Justin Lindeboom

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509933235
• eBook ISBN: 9781509945207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Law

Kälin and Kochenov's Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) ranks the objective value of all nationalities as legal statuses of attachment to states. Using a wide variety of strictly quantifiable data to gauge the opportunities presented and limitations imposed by nationalities on their holders, the QNI provides a comprehensive ranking of the intrinsic quality of each citizenship status in the world. Both the internal value (economic opportunities, human development and peace and stability) and the external value (including the number and quality of visa-free travel and, crucially, settlement destinations) of all the nationalities in the world are measured, only to reveal the reality that the quality of nationalities is not correlated with the prestige of the issuing states.
Beautifully produced, richly illustrated and accompanied by insightful expert commentary, the QNI is the seminal reference for the citizenship aficionados. It is also an invaluable tool to illustrate the huge discrepancies in the value of the nationalities of the world: showcasing first-hand the unequal distribution of rights and opportunities which different nationalities bring to their holders. The full QNI dataset on which this work is based is available in open access on Mendeley.

Part 1

Laying Down the Base

By Dimitry Kochenov and Justin Lindeboom

1The QNI’s Task: Demystifying Citizenship through Clear Data

The demystification and deromanticization of citizenships and nationalities is long overdue (Kochenov and Lindeboom 2017; Kochenov 2019a). Although much ink is spilled in the literature about concrete citizenships’ ‘values’, ‘identities’, and ‘honor’ when speaking about citizenship, two fundamental starting points — which underpin the QNI — should always be kept in mind.

Firstly, as a historically sexist and racist ‘status of being’ randomly assigned by an authority, any citizenship is inevitably arbitrary, messy, and complex. Crucially, it never depends on an individual’s wishes: the authority will decide who is a citizen no matter what his or her ‘identity’ or ‘values’ may be (Kochenov 2019b). Those who think that a parent’s ‘blood’ or the fact of birth in a particular territory is sufficient justification for the distribution of the crucial rights and entitlements that shape our lives can probably stop reading here: this book is not a neo-feudal nationalist restatement of citizenship’s glory — it is anti-feudal. Among the first premises of looking at nationalities critically — replacing nationalist mantras with objective data — is the belief that it is wrong to judge people by the color of their passports rather than by their values, education, or any other factors related to their personality, talents, and achievements. This is the key paradox of contemporary citizenship: in a world where the belief in equal human worth is the key starting point of thinking about justice, citizenship is ab initio on the losing side (Carens 2013).

The second starting point is a consequence of the first. The random distribution of rights and life chances would not be such a problem if discrepancies among the different possible outcomes of the ‘birthright lottery’ were minimal (Shachar 2009). Because this is not the case, however, the idealized concept of ‘separate but equal’ citizenship does not work (Spiro 2019a). The Basotho, Kyrgyzstanis, and Nicaraguans know this very well, as do the Austrians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, who are among the lottery’s winners. Citizenship’s random nature notwithstanding, it is extremely important to hold a ‘good’ nationality since the determinant of global inequality is now geography, not class, as was primarily the case in the past (Milanovic 2016); on average, the poorest Danes are richer and live longer and more rewarding lives than the most well-off Central Africans.

This volume’s visualizations of the world, which are a special contribution by Ben Hennig and Dimitris Ballas, make this point abundantly clear: money travels with the most elite passports, while the majority of the world’s population lives with substandard-quality nationalities at best. Because what all citizenships around the world have in common is the right to be admitted to particular places, citizenship — from an instrument of rights-proliferation and protection — has become the fundamental tool of policing and reinforcing global inequality. Central African Republic citizenship is a status that will not grant you many visas. It will more than likely ensure that you will never join the Danes or even the Russians and will die where you are. In comparison, Danish nationals can choose to settle and work without question in 43 of the richest countries and territories in the world, never facing, by virtue of their citizenship status, the problems that frame the lives of citizens of the Central African Republic.

In modern times, being admitted to desirable parts of the world — made possible only by possessing a requisite citizenship — is fundamental to all aspects of one’s life: medical care, education, wealth, and basic freedom all depend on citizenship, which is randomly ascribed at birth. The elementary raison d’être of the QNI is thus to debunk three central mythologies that surround our current ‘separate but equal’ thinking about citizenship and nationality, which are derived from black letter public international law and echo the mantras regarding the sovereign equality of states (Sironi 2013), as well as traditional philosophical and sociological analyses of what citizenship and nationality are and stand for (Marshall 1977).

The QNI demonstrates that at least three familiar myths informing our thinking about citizenship and nationality could not be further from the truth. The first myth is that all nationalities are equal, and that it is impossible to compare them because attachment to a country cannot be objectively measured, which reinforces the narrative that ‘separate but equal’ works. The QNI shows beyond any reasonable doubt that it does not, since comparing the key rights associated with different nationalities reveals huge discrepancies in their quality. The second myth is that there is a direct correlation between the power and the size of a country’s economy and the quality of its nationality. This line of thinking is equally misguided: the QNI demonstrates that the nationalities of the world’s most militarily and economically powerful countries cannot compare in quality to those of some microstates. The third myth, on which democratic justifications for upholding the ‘separate but equal’ status quo rest, holds that there is a correlation between the geographical scope of the rights granted by a nationality and the territory of the conferring state. The research informing the QNI demonstrates clearly that this correlation, which was true in the past, does not exist in the 21^st century. Some nationalities grant access to key citizenship rights, including the right to work and reside in the territories of dozens more countries than those granting the status in the first place. Some examples are visualized on the map here and here. In helping debunk these three mythologies the QNI opens a Pandora’s box of questions, some of which are discussed below and also in Dimitry Kochenov’s Citizenship (Kochenov 2019b).

Once citizenship is thoroughly scrutinized, it is evident that the above three mythologies, and many others, are deeply entrenched in how we think about nationality and citizenship and interfere with our capacity to perceive the data showing that each of them has proven to be false. This counterintuitive twist makes the QNI particularly interesting.

2What Is Citizenship or Nationality?

The idea of measuring and comparing nationalities sounds odd if we believe in the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) description of nationality as

a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• What is the QNI? The Creators’ Preface
• The Creators, Editors, and Authors of the QNI
• List of Contributors
• Part 1 Laying Down the Base
• Part 2 Methodology
• Part 3 The QNI General Ranking
• Part 4 Regional and Thematic Rankings
• Part 5 Expert Commentary
• Part 6 End Matter
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Methodological Annex
• Glossary of Terms
• Alphabetical Index of Nationality Quality Charts Included in the Text
• Acknowledgments
• eCopyright