The discussion on the civic registration model for admission to citizenship in Chapter 3 demonstrated the need to go beyond the nationality model of citizenship. In this chapter I suggest ways to improve citizenship by putting forward an anational institutional design. Evidently, designing an institutional framework for anational citizenship requires a great deal of groundwork. It not only requires a reflexive assessment of nationalism and a critical examination of the limitations of the model of national citizenship (see Chapters 1 and 2), but also an examination of how persuasively and coherently these limitations have been addressed by scholarly efforts to reconfigure patriotism and to redefine national belonging (see Chapter 3). In view of these requirements, the preceding discussion has investigated the coherence of liberal nationalist justifications of nationality and reflected on the strategies of de-accentuating the ethnic/cultural component of national citizenship (see Chapter 2) and redefining national belonging (see Chapter 3). I have argued that, although these strategies are praiseworthy efforts to solve the problems inherent in national citizenship, they nevertheless leave many issues unresolved and, moreover, alternative institutional designs need to be explored. Otherwise put, citizenship continues to be a national affair and the institutional framework of postnational citizenship remains unexplored.

Such a framework is necessary because citizenship as national membership has exclusionary effects which undermine the normative ideals of democratic participation and equality (Dahl 1989; Young 1990; Baubock 1994; Kostakopoulou 1996, 1998, 2001; Shaw 2007; Rubio-Marin 2000; Honing 2001; Benhabib 2004).