With all the silly fuss about Stéphane Dion's inherited dual citizenship, it occurs to me that it would be helpful to have the option of two-tier citizenship.
Don't worry, I don't mean that the government declares some citizens to be more equal than others.
I mean that individuals who possess dual (or triple - is that possible? If two people with different hereditary citizenships have a baby in a third country?) citizenship can optionally declare one of their citizenships to be their primary citizenship. Perhaps there could be minor consequences (can't vote in your country of secondary citizenship? must travel on your primary passport?) but the general idea is to symbolically favour one country without the symbolic slight of renouncing your other citizenship.
Why not just renounce your secondary citizenship? Apart from the fact that some countries don't allow you to renounce citizenship, renunciation tends to imply that you seriously disapprove of the other country. Remember all the fuss when Conrad Black renounced his Canadian citizenship so that he could be given a British peerage? And then when he was apparently considering taking up Canadian citizenship again, people were all offended because he's already renounced us? Not everyone wants to give their other country such a slap in the face. (Aside: wouldn't it be ironic if Stéphane Dion renounced his French citizenship, then became PM, then it leaked into France that the PM of Canada had renounced his French citizenship, and it caused an international incident because they got all offended?)
I somewhat identify with dual citizenship dilemmas because I'm second-and-a-half generation; if circumstances had been different, I could have inherited a second citizenship myself - my mother's country of birth just happened to assign citizenship differently at the time that her family left. I've never even been to my mother's country of birth. I was born in Canada, I've lived in Canada all my life, English is my first language and French is my second. I can stumble through a few words of my mother's mother tongue, but that's only because I'm the family language geek. I am Canadian - there is simply nothing else for me to be. I experience my second culture as an academic elective and a few family quirks.
If I had inherited citizenship from my mother's country of birth, I might feel the need to make it clear that my Canadian citizenship is predominant. To the casual observer this is obvious, but some people read quite a lot into dual citizenship, and some countries like to exert a stronger claim on their citizens. I might feel the need to explicitly state: "Canada, you're #1. Old Country, you're #2." But at the same time, I don't have anything against the Old Country. It's just that they're not my country. If I found myself renouncing an Old Country citizenship, it wouldn't be anything against that country, it would just be the only mechanism I have to assert the fact that Canada is #1. But the Old Country might consider that something of a slight. "What on earth does she have against us?" And I wouldn't have anything against them, it's just that I am Canadian.
So I propose that dual citizens be able to declare one of their citizenships to be primary. This wouldn't be mandatory - you could walk around with two equal citizenships if that better reflects your needs - but it would give people who fell into dual citizenship through no fault of their own the option of asserting their "loyalty" (I still don't know exactly what's intended by that word) without deliberately dissing the other country. Then we can save renunciation of citizenship for when you actively disapprove of the other country, rather than reducing such a drastic negative measure to a necessity of administrative convenience.
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