When Citizenship Becomes a Premium Membership: Who Moves, Who Rages, and Who Keeps Reigniting Nationalism

From 1990-2010, many people assumed the world was moving in a clear direction: globalization would weaken borders, the internet would dilute the nation-state, and cross-border mobility would make nationality matter less and less.

Looking back now, that was close to a generational political illusion.

The world did not become a smooth, open global village. It simply repackaged old hierarchies in more polished forms, hid old borders more deeply, and replaced old exclusions with newer language. Citizenship did not lose value; it appreciated. Borders did not disappear; they became embedded in individual life trajectories. Nationalism did not leave the stage; it just moved from textbooks, television, and state rituals into phones, comment sections, short-video feeds, and social platforms.

What truly changed is not that humanity suddenly became more conservative. It is that more and more people have come to see, all at once, that globalization was never an open order equally accessible to everyone. It has always been a sharply stratified membership system. Some people are born with a black card. Others never get through the door. Some treat citizenship as a portfolio choice; others experience it as fate. Some treat the state as a platform; others treat it as their last reservoir of dignity.

That is why dual citizenship, emigration, the anger of those who stay, digital nationalism, xenophobia, and the return of the right are not scattered topics at all. They all belong to the same fracture line. Its name is the stratification of citizenship—and the political consequences that follow once that stratification becomes fully visible in the digital age.

I. The spread of dual citizenship does not mean the state matters less. It means the state has become more realistic. Link to heading

The growing normality of dual citizenship in developed countries is enough to show one thing: the state has not disappeared. It has become more pragmatic.

The old nation-state was built around exclusive loyalty. If you belonged to one state, you were supposed to belong only to that state. You accepted its protection and carried its obligations. That logic made sense in the era of mass conscription, closed borders, expensive migration, and single-track identities.

But that is no longer the world we live in. A person can be born in one country, educated in another, work in a third, support parents aging in a fourth, and spread assets, spouses, children, insurance, and professional networks across multiple jurisdictions. If states still demand a clean, total severance of loyalty, they corner themselves first.

That is why more and more countries tolerate—and sometimes actively welcome—dual citizenship. Not because they have become more idealistic, but because they have realized the alternative is costly: fewer immigrants, weaker talent attraction, and more fragile ties with their own diasporas.

In that sense, the spread of dual citizenship is not a sign that the idea of the state is collapsing. It is the result of the state becoming more rational. States no longer imagine that every person can spend an entire life under one flag alone. They are beginning to accept a more realistic order: belonging can overlap, loyalties can be layered, identities can accumulate—but membership is still issued by the state.

That point matters. It means the modern state has not lost power. It has simply updated the rules. It no longer clings to the myth of singular loyalty, yet it still controls passports, welfare, voting rights, residence rights, deportation, consular protection, and legal entry points. What it has surrendered is a classical narrative, not sovereignty itself.

II. The frightening thing about citizenship is not what it says you are. It is where it allows you to go. Link to heading

When people talk about citizenship, they still tend to start with emotion: culture, language, history, community, identity. All of that matters. But if that is still the only way we understand citizenship, we miss its cruelest dimension.

In the contemporary world, citizenship is first and foremost a mechanism for allocating resources.

What does high-value citizenship mean? Visa-free travel. Work authorization. Financial credibility. Lower friction in global mobility. A second exit in times of crisis. Automatic access for one’s children to another educational and welfare system. And what does low-value citizenship mean? Queues. Scrutiny. Visa humiliation. Suspicion that you might overstay. Treatment as a potential burden. Exclusion from high-yield institutional systems.

That is why citizenship increasingly resembles a premium membership card. This is not a metaphor. It is a social fact.

Some people are born as black-card users, moving across the world as if tapping a gate. Others spend their lives explaining at borders why they will not work illegally, overstay, or become a problem. Some discuss migration as a lifestyle upgrade. Others ask whether they will ever be allowed a second life.

That is why the phrase “birthright lottery” cuts so deeply. Where you are born, which passport you inherit, whether you can claim a second nationality—these things often determine your institutional ceiling long before you are even capable of making meaningful choices.

Effort matters, of course. But whether effort can be redeemed depends in large part on what kind of citizenship identity a person is assigned in the first place. Citizenship is not just an administrative label. It is one of the earliest—and harshest—distributors of life chances.

III. What hurts about dual citizenship is not that it exists, but that only some people get to use it strategically. Link to heading

What creates psychological rupture is not dual citizenship as a legal institution. It is the fact that only some people are allowed to treat citizenship as strategy.

For the global upper class, the upper middle class, and some transnational professionals, citizenship can be planned, optimized, layered, and upgraded. It can improve through birth, marriage, work, naturalization, and long-term family arrangements. In their hands, citizenship comes close to being a legal version of asset allocation.

But for many others, citizenship is not a tool but a cage; not an option but a floor of fate. The question is not “Where do I want to live?” but “Am I even eligible to be admitted into another system?”

This produces an extraordinarily sharp split in modern experience.

One side understands the state as a platform: if it performs badly, you switch; if the cost rises, you relocate; if the rules are hostile, you look for alternatives.

The other side understands the state as the only possible destination: no switching, no exit, no backup. In some cases, even complaining requires first proving that you are not disloyal.

Once these two groups occupy the same public sphere, conflict becomes almost inevitable. The first side hears itself saying something obvious: people move upward, and citizenship is just institutional choice. The second side hears something else entirely: so you really can leave, while I have to endure humiliation even to imagine leaving.

The problem is never just a disagreement in values. It is a difference in existential position.

IV. The nationalism of those who stay is, at bottom, a form of border defense by the trapped. Link to heading

Why do so many people with low mobility, no second citizenship, and weak passport power display such hostility toward coethnics who move abroad? Why do they so often wave the banner of patriotism, denounce those who leave, and escalate toward verbal violence?

From a moralizing distance, this is easy to dismiss as narrow-mindedness, conservatism, or fragility. But the sociological view is colder—and sharper. Much of the time, this is not patriotism in any pure sense. It is compensation for structural limitation.

When a person has little mobility capital, no meaningful exit option, and no plausible second life, the easiest thing to cling to is loyalty. Loyalty requires no visa, no proof of funds, no credential recognition, no permission from foreign institutions. It is one of the cheapest forms of identity capital—and one of the most morally elevated.

So the question “Why can’t I leave?” is translated into “I am more loyal than you.”

That is the core mechanism of the nationalism of those who stay. Through moral language, it turns structural powerlessness into symbolic superiority. It is not that I lacked opportunity; it is that I did not betray. It is not that I was trapped; it is that I am more worthy of being called a real citizen.

This is why so much of the rhetoric aimed at those who leave appears to be about the nation but is really about humiliation. It is trying to repair a damaged sense of self: why do others get a second life while I do not? Why can others treat the state as a platform while I can only treat it as destiny?

And when such questions cannot be answered honestly, the easiest move is to turn them into moral judgment.

You are not patriotic. You forgot your roots. You look down on your compatriots. You make foreign money and still lecture your homeland. You are a traitor.

These lines do more than insult. They redraw the boundary. Who counts as one of us? Who has lost the right to speak for the community? Who has already been expelled from the moral inside? Who no longer gets to speak in the name of the nation?

V. Hatred toward those who leave is often less a disagreement of opinion than an emotional projection of unequal opportunity. Link to heading

Why are those who leave such easy targets? Because they are the most visible reminder.

They remind those who stay that some people really can leave the system. That the so-called “community of shared fate” is not, in fact, fate for everyone. That for some, borders are not walls but doors. That life can, in a sense, be restarted.

That reminder triggers two emotions at once: envy and resentment.

The envy is obvious. Those who leave often seem to stand for higher-value institutions, broader choices, and looser life possibilities.

The resentment is equally obvious. Their mere existence keeps proving that what you were told to accept as destiny was never universally accepted.

This is why attacks on migrants, overseas compatriots, dual citizens, and offshore critics are rarely just about the issue at hand. They are often vehicles for a larger displacement of emotion. Structural inequality of opportunity gets translated into a competition over moral purity. The injustice of the world becomes a fight over who is more entitled to speak of patriotism.

This sort of violence is especially common in societies whose global position is insecure, whose internal mobility is constrained, and whose national narrative is saturated with the language of common destiny. In such settings, departure is not narrated as geographical movement. It is narrated as spiritual betrayal.

Many people assume that those who remain at home will be more nationalist, while those who leave become more realistic and more moderate. Reality often points the other way.

A large body of research on diaspora politics has shown repeatedly that leaving the homeland does not necessarily weaken nationalism. On the contrary, some diasporas push homeland politics in a more moralized, more symbolic, and less compromise-friendly direction.

Why? Because distance produces purity.

When people no longer bear the everyday costs of the homeland, they can more easily turn it into a morally saturated object of imagination. The homeland ceases to be tax bills, rent, traffic, unemployment, and bureaucracy. It becomes historical trauma, national glory, civilizational mission, and collective memory of victimhood. The farther away it is, the easier it is to purify. The more purified it becomes, the easier it is to raise loyalty as a banner.

That is how a seemingly contradictory scene emerges:

Those who remain at home accuse those who left of disloyalty. Those who left, in turn, accuse people inside the homeland of not being loyal enough.

In truth, both sides are doing the same thing: fighting over the right to define loyalty.

Who counts as a real insider? Who has the authority to define the homeland? Who has the right to represent historical wounds? Who is handing a knife to the outside enemy?

This is the general grammar of homeland moral policing. It does not depend on any one country, any one civilization, or any single ideology. It depends on one condition alone: the elevation of the nation from a concrete institutional reality into a moral altar.

VII. What makes nationalism more frightening today is not that it is more extreme. It is that it has become more ordinary. Link to heading

People often say nationalism existed before, xenophobia existed before, and the right did not emerge only yesterday. All of that is true.

The problem is that today’s nationalism has an infrastructure earlier versions did not: mobile internet, social media, algorithmic recommendation, platform dogpiling, and round-the-clock emotional connectivity.

That is the real difference between the late twentieth century and the present.

Earlier forms of nationalism were more often vertically produced by state institutions, mainstream media, schools, major national events, and formal propaganda systems. They were powerful, certainly—but also periodic, paced, and tied to specific ritual spaces.

Today’s nationalism is different. It has been broken into fragments and embedded in everyday use. It lives in trending lists, comment threads, short videos, memes, group chats, fandoms, boycott lists, pile-ons, and repost chains. It no longer requires a large mobilization to appear. It can ignite instantly from a celebrity remark, a consumer controversy, an international incident, or an entertainment headline.

That means nationalism is no longer merely a button the state presses from time to time. It has become an emotional template ordinary users can activate almost at will.

It is more fragmented, but also stickier; more entertaining, but also crueler; more decentralized, but harder to extinguish.

VIII. Little Pink nationalism, Indian digital nationalism, and moral policing in Eastern Europe and the Middle East all run on the same platform logic. Link to heading

Digital nationalisms across different countries, religions, and historical backgrounds look distinct on the surface. But once you break them down by mechanism, the resemblance is striking.

First, they all construct a morally charged “we.”

Second, they all maintain boundaries through distinctions between the “real national” and the suspicious insider.

Third, they all recode dissent, departure, detachment, and compromise as disloyalty.

Fourth, they all use digital platforms to turn performances of loyalty into real-time interaction.

In other words, they are all doing the same kind of work: reorganizing scattered individuals into a national community built around victim memory, collective glory, friend-enemy division, and platform-enabled dogpiling.

In China, this appears in the hunting of alleged “traitors,” labeling, witch-hunts, and collective humiliation directed at those accused of insulting the nation. In India, it often appears in the online expulsion of those cast as “anti-national.” In Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it is more tightly tied to national trauma, sovereignty disputes, war memory, and homeland conflict.

On the surface, everyone is speaking a different language. Underneath, they are running the same system.

The core of that system is not theoretical sophistication. It is platform compatibility. It is emotional enough, short enough, morally legible enough, and sharply polarized enough to spread.

IX. But digital nationalism alone cannot explain why it finds such a large audience. Link to heading

Blaming everything on mobile internet is convenient—and not entirely wrong. But if we imagine platforms created hatred out of nowhere, we are still being too superficial.

What platforms amplify must first exist as anxiety in the social world.

And one of the most important anxieties of the present is economic insecurity.

Economic insecurity here does not simply mean poverty or unemployment. It refers more to a diffuse sense of instability: work no longer feels secure, income expectations are falling, housing is unaffordable, upward mobility is harder, public services are more fragile, and the next generation may not live better than the last.

Once that feeling spreads, people will search for explanations.

The problem is that complex explanations rarely circulate well. Fiscal systems, industrial restructuring, global capital flows, automation, geopolitics—these may all be real, but they are too complicated, too slow, and too ill-suited to social media.

By contrast, “outsiders are taking our jobs,” “immigrants are consuming welfare,” or “they are destroying our way of life” is almost perfectly optimized for circulation. It is simple, emotional, morally sharp, and points to a clear target.

That is why economic anxiety in the digital age is so easily converted into hostility toward out-groups.

The real danger of platforms is not just that they can spread information. It is that they can reorganize emotion.

A person may begin with nothing more than a vague sense that life is becoming less stable, the future more difficult, and institutions colder. But inside the platform environment, that anxiety gets repeatedly recoded.

First, it is assigned a clear object: immigrants, outsiders, minorities, global elites, people who betrayed the nation.

Then it is placed inside a high-frequency narrative loop. Algorithms keep surfacing content that matches your existing unease, making you encounter the same explanatory frame over and over again.

Finally, it is morally elevated. You are no longer simply expressing frustration; you are “defending the nation,” “protecting your people,” or “stopping the erosion of the community.”

Once that chain is complete, ordinary anxiety becomes xenophobic emotion. Xenophobic emotion becomes political stance. Political stance becomes group hatred and voting behavior.

That is why today’s xenophobia differs from older versions. It is not just a fringe outburst from extremists from time to time. It is a daily psychological structure that is continuously fed by platforms, heated by algorithms, and rewarded by social feedback loops.

It no longer depends entirely on official propaganda, because ordinary users have learned to produce, replicate, and spread it themselves.

XI. Developed countries are moving rightward not because they suddenly became underdeveloped, but because the promise of a stable life is failing. Link to heading

The xenophobia, right-wing expansion, and politics of hatred in developed countries are often described as civilizational decline. That is not exactly wrong, but it is not enough.

The deeper reality is that in many developed societies, the promise that once underwrote lower- and middle-class stability is breaking down.

Industrial decline, soaring housing costs, pressure on welfare states, decaying public services, blocked intergenerational mobility, increasing visibility of multicultural difference, and the return of geopolitical shocks have produced a dangerous emotional environment. People still live in rich countries, but they no longer believe their future will improve by default.

Once the promise of a stable life collapses, politics becomes rapidly identity-driven. When distributional problems remain unresolved for too long, what gets activated most easily is no longer policy debate, but the boundary conflict of who belongs here and who does not.

Under those conditions, immigrants, minorities, transnational elites, global institutions, and cultural liberals can all become vessels for the same anger. The right has returned in many developed countries not because it suddenly became more intellectually compelling, but because it is better at compressing complex disorder into a single sentence: all of this happened because “they” came in and “we” were abandoned.

XII. Putting the whole chain together: citizenship becomes membership, identity becomes hierarchy, loyalty becomes a weapon, hatred becomes platformed. Link to heading

If the logic of this essay were compressed into a single line, it would look something like this.

First, the expansion of dual citizenship and transnational mobility has made citizenship increasingly resemble a premium membership that can be upgraded, combined, and inherited.

Second, access to that membership is not widely shared. It is distributed highly unequally, giving some people greater exit options and institutional security while leaving others trapped in low mobility and low-value passports.

Third, once that gap becomes hyper-visible in the age of mobile internet, those who stay, those with a single nationality, low-mobility groups, and people who have lost confidence in future stability become more likely to treat national loyalty as their last form of identity capital.

Fourth, economic insecurity supplies the fuel, while digital platforms supply the infrastructure of circulation and organization. Xenophobia then finds precisely the environment it needs to thrive.

Finally, all of this converges into the reality now in front of us:

Citizenship is turned into membership. Identity is turned into hierarchy. Loyalty is turned into a weapon. Anxiety is turned against out-groups. Hatred is turned into a platformed system.

This is not a random accumulation of separate events. It is a new structure of political emotion.

Conclusion: The world is not returning to nationalism. It is finally seeing that it has always lived inside a hierarchy. Link to heading

Perhaps the most unsettling thing is not that nationalism has returned.

What is truly unsettling is that more and more people are beginning to understand that the so-called open world never abolished hierarchy. It simply turned hierarchy into a better-looking product, citizenship into a more premium ticket, mobility into the default right of a few, and then asked everyone else to interpret their own lack of mobility as loyalty.

That is why dual citizens are cast as opportunists, migrants as betrayers, outsiders as threats, and dissidents as enemies within. Not because these people are naturally hateful figures, but because they all touch the same nerve of the age: they remind those without premium membership that the entrances to this world are not equal.

So the real question we need to answer today is not “Why have people become so extreme?” It is a harsher, more honest one:

If citizenship increasingly resembles a premium membership card, and platforms expose that gap to everyone twenty-four hours a day, what can modern societies still offer in place of the thin but real dignity, belonging, and security that nationalism provides?