In this essay, Benno Gammerl compares the development of nationality and citizenship in Hungary and Canada, focusing in particular on the legal and administrative treatment of ethnic diff erences. In his analysis of the Hungarian nationality law of 1879, the Magyarisation policy from around 1900, the emigration law of 1909 and the failed franchise reform of 1908/13 he identifi es an ever increasing importance of a national logic and rhetoric. Simultaneously the very concept of the nation was transformed from a supra-ethnic into an ethnically exclusive one. In Canada legal developments followed similar lines. The Canadian migration policy, the naturalisation regulations of 1903 and 1914, the immigration law of 1910, as well as the various Indian Acts aimed internally at the abolition of ethnic diff erences and the production of legal equality, while they were externally directed towards the racist exclusion of certain groups. Subsequently, Gammerl also describes the imperial contexts of both cases and points out that national logics, politics of recognition and concepts of ethnic neutrality co-existed in the Habsburg Empire, while the law in the British Empire came to be dominated by the logic of racial discrimination after 1900. Instead of those diff erences, legal developments in Hungary and in Canada were both stamped by nationalising and ethicizing tendencies and aimed internally at legal equality and homogeneity, while externally at ethnically defi ned in – and exclusions, thus following to a large extent the logic of the nation state. In his conclusion, Gammerl explains this similarity by stressing that Hungary and Canada both occupied sub-metropolitan and semi-peripheral positions within the two Empires.