Moving to Finland and acquiring Finnish nationality were, for me, decisions I made freely, choosing my own path as an individual. However, when I notified my country of origin, it didn’t take it very well. Spain gave me an ultimatum: sign a declaration of loyalty to the fatherland or lose my nationality.
That’s right — according to Spanish law (Article 24.1 of the Civil Code), citizens who acquire a foreign nationality such as the Finnish must declare, within three years, their intention to retain Spanish nationality, or else they’ll lose it. In other words, Spain treats my decision not as that of a free and responsible adult entering into social contracts — as claimed by the liberal spirit of its Constitution — but as the betrayal of a son abandoning his parents, or a married man abandoning his wife. This revealed something important about our institutions.
As can be seen in that same article of the Civil Code, Spain tolerates dual nationality with many Latin American countries. This is due to historical ties that go back to conquest and colonization — essentially, an extended family forged by baptism and the sword. Spain also tolerates dual nationality with Portugal, though in this case for reasons of neighborhood, culture, and religious affinity. But my acquiring Finnish nationality seemed to Spain like marrying outside the family. Finland, after all, belongs to the European Union, a union of liberal democracies inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. Spain’s reaction, however, seemed closer to the mentality of the Ancien Régime, clinging to a sense of dynastic loyalty rather than embracing the contractual freedom of modern citizenship.
To add irony to injury, Spain automatically claims my daughter as Spanish — a child born in Finland to a Finnish mother — while threatening to disown me, the very one who gives the child her “Spanish blood.” This reveals the depth of this logic of kinship: to be a son or a citizen is fundamentally a contract imposed by nature — a threefold contradiction in terms.
Historical Origins of the Family-State
For most of human history, individuality was unthinkable. People were subjects of gods and rulers, and before that, they were children of their clan or family. The Enlightenment began to challenge these inherited authorities, dismantling divine kingship and the dominance of the Church. But even Enlightenment thinkers, although they imagined the citizen as an adult capable of signing existential contracts, could not fully break away from this old legacy. The state proposed by Rousseau and others remained, in many ways, an expanded household.
Rousseau’s philosophy is filled with this psychological tension between family and individual. On one hand, Rousseau imagined a kind of natural anarchy as the true condition of man. He saw early humans as solitary, self-sufficient beings, free from the family obligations that would later alienate them. Yet at the same time, Rousseau proposed a solution that was, paradoxically, a return to the very structure he seemed to critique. His concept of the “general will” was not a community of freely associating individuals, but a moral collective, a reinvented family. He effectively asked people to give up their individual freedom and dissolve themselves into the will of the collective, promising that in doing so they would recover their true liberty.
This tension began to resolve itself when, in 1793, a thinker like William Godwin, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, articulated the first formal expression of anarchism. Godwin asked the obvious question: if we are truly adults, why do we remain under the parental authority of Father or Mother State? Why should we stay married to someone we never chose? Godwin extended his critique of the state to a critique of marriage itself, recognizing that both are institutions that impose an arbitrary and visceral loyalty, even when they appear to be based on a contract.
In a way, this was merely the latest chapter in a deeper and longer historical struggle: the gradual and relentless questioning of the family, from the divine authority of the Church challenged by the Reformation, to the fall of kings, and finally to the state itself.
The Test of Experience
Today, for most people, life seems to unfold within a legitimate and modern framework of nation-state. They feel part of an existence that appears contractual, rational, one that — in theory — has left behind the arbitrariness of the past: the tyranny of kings, the impositions of the Church, or the forced bonds of family lineage. But this illusion quickly fades the moment a man — or a virus — puts the system to the test.
When I decided to acquire Finnish nationality, I did so as an adult seeking happiness, but also with the desire to break these historical chains. Yet in the eyes of the Spanish state, and in part my own parents, this was seen as a betrayal: as if, by becoming the “child” of another nation, I had also become the “husband” of another home, deserting the exclusive bond that my ancestors had intended to maintain with me and my descendants.
The parallel with Godwin’s critique of marriage is striking. He did not reject the free bond between people, but rather the institutionalization that turns spouses into each other’s exclusive property — just as states turn their citizens into the exclusive children of one “fatherland.” In both cases, absolute loyalty is demanded, and signing other contracts is condemned as an unforgivable infidelity.
And so, almost ironically, my action aligns with the ideal of freedom that Godwin and Wollstonecraft defended over two hundred years ago. Clearly, this is not a rejection of cooperation or human bonds, but a refusal to let those bonds be dictated by a hypocritical ideal of kinship and “nature.” My choice to marry and naturalize in Finland was, at heart, a practical affirmation that the truest bonds do not spring from blood or coercion.