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For the nearly two decades after she fled Nazi Germany, political theorist Hannah Arendt lacked any national citizenship. In 1951, the same year she became a naturalized U.S. citizen, Arendt argued in her best-selling book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that there was no surer sign of liberalism's demise and totalitarianism's rise than a government's decision to inflict statelessness on whole classes of people for their ostensible inability to fit the terms of national belonging. To be dispossessed of one's citizenship was to experience political annihilation, if not the total annihilation that hundreds of thousands of German Jews had suffered. In Arendt's words, national citizenship provided “the right to have rights,” a formulation that would travel from the pages of her book to the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court.1
While Arendt identified statelessness as the primary challenge to liberalism, its inverse—we might call it statefulness—was equally disruptive to the mid- to late-twentieth-century ideals of national sovereignty and individual rights. As it developed in the modern period, citizenship served as an exclusive contractual relationship between an individual and a territorially defined political unit, one validating the sovereignty of the other, and each playing a part in maintaining a geopolitical order defined by nation-state–based rights. But the dislocations, migrations, conquests, and redrawing of borders of the twentieth century persistently destabilized that relationship, producing not only stateless but also stateful individuals. A person without a state might suffer the fate of losing their political rights, while a person with multiple states threatened the very container of modern political rights: nation-state sovereignty.2
Here I draw attention to a small group of American citizens—three Jewish men—who attracted state authorities’ suspicion for their statefulness. Each of these men was expatriated from American citizenship after spending significant time in Palestine/Israel, yet none wished to relinquish his citizenship. Calling upon the legal framework of liberal individualism, they argued in cases before American administrative and judicial bodies in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s that their sovereignty guaranteed them and not the state the right to determine whether they desired to remain American citizens, regardless of their status or conduct in other territories. Nonetheless, American officials worried that individual sovereignty expressed as allegiance to multiple states eroded national sovereignty. The complicated realities...