Allegiance, Loyalty, and Citizenship

What does it mean to be loyal?

As near as I can tell it means the willingness to do something that you generally consider "wrong," or not do something that you would normally do, for the benefit of another person. For example, if you see someone shoplifting, you might report them (assuming you care enough, most people would think this is the proper course of action). If you see your best friend shoplifting, you wouldn't report him. This is because you're loyal to your friend, but not a random stranger. Of course loyalty is usually limited (if you saw your best friend commit murder, you would probably be very conflicted, and maybe report him). Some people have good objections to this view of loyalty, but this is the way I believe it works.

Although loyalty to a person is relatively easy to define, loyalty to an ideal or a country is harder, but I believe it follows the same general vein. Loyalty to an ideal means you're willing to do some things wrong, to further the goals of this ideal.

Loyalty to a country means you're willing to put the interests of your country above the interests of other countries. That is, you want your country to win, even if it means other countries lose. Unfortunately, there's also a problem with defining what a country is. Is a country the nation-state? Is a country the people that live in it? Is a country the government? Or is it the ideals that a country claims to embody? (Sometimes the main loyalty also isn't to a country, but to a religion say).

In any case, it is not too far of a stretch (in my opinion it's not a stretch at all) to see that Citizenship is granted based on loyalties. That is, you get Citizenship to the country you value more than any other. Of course than there's the problem with dual citizenship, but usually you're only allowed to get that if your two countries are allies. I know several people that openly proclaim that their main loyalty is not to the United States, and are US Citizens. Should they be denied citizenship? (well, according to the rules of dual citizenship they shouldn't, but...) Then I know some people that say they feel no loyalty to the US, what about them? Finally, there's people like me, I feel no loyalty to any country that I can think of? Where should I get Citizenship?

Anyways, I think the whole idea of loyalty is... not good in some senses. For example, if you're in a court case with a judge, you definetly want the judge to have no loyalties to any of the people involved. So, inside your country you always have a person that fixes things when loyalty gets in the way, but in the world at large, no such arbiter exists. (As I learned in my poli sci class, this is called an anarchic system). So, whereas loyalty doesn't cause any major problems in a country, it can cause major problems between countries.