Citizenship and Legitimacy: The Case of Quebec

• In Event: Conferring and Challenging State Legitimacy through Citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship can be used as a tool to confer legitimacy not only by sovereign states but also by substate governments and movements. Although internal or multilevel citizenship, in which state citizenship coexists with similar forms of political membership at other levels, is generally considered inadmissible in international law, recent years have witnessed a proliferation of supranational and subnational “citizenships.” This paper considers the idea of a Quebec citizenship within the Canadian federation, such as that proposed in Bill 195—a private member’s bill introduced by Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois in 2007. The Bill provided that Quebec citizenship would be automatically granted to all Canadian citizens residing in Quebec but that any newcomers arriving after the Bill’s enactment, including Canadians moving to Quebec after the law had been passed, would need to pass a competency exam in French. Clearly designed as an electoral ploy, the proposal did not advance very far and was not introduced as a legislative proposal even after Ms. Marois became Premier of Quebec in 2012. The paper examines the precursors to this proposal—such as the 2001 Larose Commission recommendation for establishing an official Quebec citizenship alongside Canadian citizenship “to reflect the attachment of Quebecers to the entire array of patrimonial and democratic institutions and values that they have in common”—and evaluates it in comparative perspective, focusing on the “nested” political identities promoted by some political theorists and found empirically in multilevel systems, such as the European Union and Union of South American Nations.

Author

• Willem Maas, York University