Citizenship ceremonies perform
Citizenship ceremonies are theater. The pledge of allegiance, the flag raising, the collective recitation—all of it performs belonging rather than creating it. What we witness is not the birth of a citizen but the staging of state legitimacy.
──── Value assignment through ritual
The ceremony doesn’t make you a citizen. The paperwork does. But paperwork lacks performative power, so the state creates a ritual to assign emotional weight to bureaucratic reality.
You stand in rows with strangers, repeat words you may not understand, and applaud on cue. The ceremony tells you this moment matters—not because it changes your legal status, but because it manufactures the feeling that legal status should matter to your identity.
This is value assignment through collective performance. The state needs you to believe citizenship has intrinsic worth, not just instrumental utility.
──── Manufacturing authentic belonging
The ceremony’s genius lies in its simulation of authentic community formation. Strangers become “fellow citizens” through synchronized behavior. Shared ritual creates the illusion of shared values.
But examine the content: what values are actually shared beyond submission to the same legal framework? The ceremony doesn’t discover pre-existing bonds—it manufactures the appearance of bonds through coordinated action.
This is belonging as bureaucratic product. The state cannot create genuine community, so it stages the aesthetic of community and calls it citizenship.
──── The audience is the real target
New citizens are props in a performance whose real audience is existing citizens. The ceremony doesn’t primarily serve those taking the oath—it serves those watching them take it.
Existing citizens observe foreigners choosing their country, validating their own passive inheritance of nationality. The ceremony transforms citizenship from accident of birth into apparent choice, making inherited privilege feel like earned value.
This is psychological validation through performed desire. Your citizenship becomes valuable because others appear to want it.
──── Loyalty as theatrical product
The loyalty pledged in citizenship ceremonies is theatrical loyalty—performed for an audience, scripted by the state, and disconnected from genuine allegiance.
Real loyalty emerges from experience, not recitation. But states need visible loyalty, manageable loyalty, loyalty that can be scheduled and staged for public consumption.
The ceremony produces loyalty as social product, not personal commitment. It demonstrates that the individual has submitted to the performance requirements of citizenship, regardless of internal conviction.
──── Value through exclusivity
Citizenship ceremonies derive their meaning from who cannot attend. The ritual’s power lies not in inclusion but in exclusion—creating value through scarcity rather than abundance.
Those excluded become necessary for those included to feel special. The ceremony doesn’t celebrate universal human dignity but particularist belonging. Your citizenship has value because others lack it.
This is zero-sum value creation. The worth of your membership requires others’ non-membership.
──── The commodity of belonging
Modern citizenship ceremonies transform belonging into commodity experience. Photography packages, family viewing areas, certificate frames—the entire apparatus treats citizenship as consumer product.
You don’t just become a citizen; you purchase the citizenship experience. The state provides the ritual, you provide the emotional investment, and both parties pretend this transaction creates authentic community.
This commodification reveals citizenship’s actual function: not as bond between individuals but as relationship between individual and state apparatus.
──── Performance anxiety of states
States require citizenship ceremonies because legal citizenship alone is insufficient for state legitimacy. Pure legal relationships feel arbitrary and fragile. States need citizens to feel emotionally invested in their citizenship.
The ceremony addresses the state’s performance anxiety—its need to seem worthy of allegiance rather than merely entitled to it. Through ritual, the state attempts to earn what it otherwise simply claims.
This is legitimacy theater. The state performs worthiness because it cannot simply declare it.
──── Post-national implications
In increasingly post-national contexts, citizenship ceremonies become more elaborate, not less. As the practical value of citizenship declines relative to global mobility and digital identity, its ceremonial value inflates.
The more citizenship matters less in daily life, the more states invest in making it feel important through ritual. The ceremony compensates for citizenship’s declining functional relevance through increased emotional choreography.
We are witnessing the aestheticization of political belonging as its substance dissolves.
──── The performed consensus
Citizenship ceremonies create the appearance of consensual government through staged consent. New citizens apparently choose their political system, validating the system for those who inherited it without choice.
But this consent is procedural, not substantive. You consent to the legal framework, not to specific policies or leaders. The ceremony obscures this distinction, presenting legal submission as political endorsement.
This is consent as performance art. The ritual stages democratic legitimacy without requiring democratic participation.
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Citizenship ceremonies reveal how states manufacture the values they claim to represent. Belonging becomes product, loyalty becomes performance, and community becomes bureaucratic theater.
The question is not whether these ceremonies create real citizens, but whether we need the kind of citizenship they create. Perhaps genuine political community requires less performance and more genuine choice—including the choice not to perform belonging on command.
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