Making Citizens

Public Rituals and Personal Journeys to Citizenship

Bridget Byrne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349434152, 9781137003201
• eBook ISBN: 9781137003218
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Social Sciences

In an increasingly mobile world with mounting concerns about the states' control of borders and migration, passports and citizenship rights matter more than ever. This book asks what citizenship ceremonies can tell us about how citizenship is understood through empirical research in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Ireland.

1

Introduction

Le monde n’est pas ronde.

In the artistic webzine Mondepasrond.net on migration, borders and human rights, Antoine Cassar explains why, for him, the world is not round:

According to which passport one holds, the world takes on a different size and shape – governments have conveniently imposed upon individuals a world in the form of a complex polyhedron of nation-states.¹

The starting point of this book is both an appreciation of the importance of passports and an interest in those few who manage to cross borders, to navigate rules, regulations and testing, to acquire new citizenship and, consequently, new passports. The central concern of the book is the reception that these new national citizens get in their new countries, and particularly where the state chooses to mark the making of new citizens with official ceremonies. I will analyse this ceremonial performance of citizenship in six countries across the (Western) world – the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK and Ireland – examining the ways in which citizenship and the nation are represented in the ceremonies. In particular, I’ll ask: How does the state choose to represent itself and migrants in these ceremonies? Who is upheld as the citizen to be welcomed or embraced by the state, and what forms of citizenship are silenced or rejected in these representations? What kind of potential identities – national, local and more global – are suggested by the ceremonies? And what identities are suppressed or ignored?

The book will also explore the experience of new citizens who have taken part in the ceremonies across ten different locations in the UK, asking why they chose to become British citizens, what their experience of migrating to the UK has been, and what they think of the citizenship ceremonies. These accounts tell us the different ways in which the world is, indeed, not round, and the impact of border crossing on individuals’ lives. Their descriptions also, in juxtaposition with the ceremonies themselves, raise questions about the nation’s representation both of itself (particularly in terms of the narration of nation as welcoming spaces) and of its citizens and non-citizens. The research in this book needs to be understood in the context of a rising discourse which contests, or even proposes the end of, multiculturalism(s). These policies, which recognised, accommodated and sometimes celebrated cultural difference, were – particularly in Western Europe – the product of post-colonial migration (Modood 2007; Meer 2010; Lentin and Titley 2011; Meer and Modood 2014).

Citizenship ceremonies were introduced in the UK ten years ago (2004) as part of a government policy of renewed attention to citizenship arising out of concerns about immigration, integration and the proposed ‘failures’ of multiculturalism. The ceremonies in the UK were not developed in isolation: they took inspiration from those which former settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia – had been holding for many years, and which, particularly in the case of US, are frequently represented in popular culture.² The introduction of citizenship ceremonies in the UK also influenced the establishment of similar rituals in other countries in the European Union, including the Netherlands and Ireland. This book will provide a comparison of the ceremonies in these six countries, covering both those that are longer established in countries of colonial settlement and the more recent introductions in Europe.

The ceremonies are of interest because they are a moment in which the state creates a narrative of what a citizen is, as well as of how immigration regimes intersect with citizenship and the nation. These public events can shed light on how the citizen is imagined, and who – or what forms of citizenship – are excluded from this imagining. The rituals provide a rich source of narratives of nation and citizenship. Stories are told through the buildings in which the ceremonies are held; in the symbols, flags and portraits that are displayed, and in the rituals which are created. They are also told in the oaths/pledges or affirmations which are recited. Finally, they are told in the way the participants – those passing from being citizens-to-be (who I will call ‘citizands’) to citizens are addressed – as part of the national community or separated from it.

This book is the first in-depth comparative account of different citizenship ceremonies across the world. It traces the ways in which these public occasions function as rites of passage and how they share a similar symbolic lexicon of initiation to the nation. The book is also unique in that it is based on research derived from observation of the ceremonies in six countries and interviews with those who organised them. Additionally, in the case of the UK, I interviewed those who had just participated in the events and become citizens.

Whilst there are many different forms of citizenship and ways of understanding it, nation-state citizenship is critical in determining where people can live, work and travel. I will argue that citizenship is never neutral. In the context of Western countries, notions of membership and rights have emerged out of a racialised, classed and gendered history of colonialism and post-colonialism which has shaped both nation and migration. The formation of the nation-state system and the technological developments that enabled the state’s control of movement over state borders emerged within the colonial context. The rights attached to citizenship have not been made evenly available to women, to sexual minorities, to the working class and to colonised and racialised Others. In fact, citizenship – how it is understood, who is said to possess it – has often emerged out of a process of differentiating between citizens and those gendered, raced and classed others – the anti-citizens (Barbero 2012). The construction of the anti-citizen – for example in the figure of the illegal migrant, the terrorist, the uncivilised Other, the deviant – can tell us much about the contours of citizenship. It can also act as a warning to citizens about how they should behave.

Nation-state citizenship is a constantly shifting terrain with a seemingly endless proliferation of modifications of Western nations’ rules and regulations regarding immigration and citizenship. The continual adjustment to immigration rules and regulations is not only the product of increased levels of securitisation³ and suspicion about the migrant (particularly against certain groups of migrants); it also indicates the ‘unnatural’ state of citizenship. Citizenship is in a permanent state of reconstruction and redefinition – by the state, as well as by non-state actors (Isin 2012a). Citizenship has to be adjusted in part because the messy, interconnected lives of people do not always stay within the narrow confines of state citizenship. People move across borders (or borders move across people’s lives), and the numerous cases where the rules prove to be illogical or contradictory – due to their inability to govern the variety of people’s movements and affiliations – exposes the ways in which citizenship as a state and social contract which is often inadequate for the task of governing social relations. National citizenship is often constructed as inevitable and something that has ‘always been there’. This is indeed suggested in the term ‘naturalisation’ – to establish something as if natural. But at the same time, the language of naturalisation highlights the idea that the person is not naturally of the state – and perhaps more particularly of the nation. If you have to be ‘naturalised’ how can you be native? Naturalisation suggests impossibility – that is, you may be naturalised, but of course no one can be made natural – as it suggests artifice and unnaturalness.⁴ This raises the question of whether the new citizen would ever really be seen as ‘equal to’ the (real) national. Will naturalised citizens ever properly belong, or will they always be somehow ‘probationary’ to use the emerging language in the UK, where the model is increasingly that of ‘earning’ citizenship? The possibility, under certain conditions, of the revocation of naturalisation also points to its potential non-permanence and to a less-than-full-citizenship.⁵ Naturalisation is potentially an ‘unhappy performative’,⁶ where the act of naturalisation fails to make the person a natural/native citizen.

The idea that membership of the nation-state is somehow ‘natural’ also opens a route for the membership to be about biology and race, or about a profound level of culture which cannot be imitated or learnt. This again raises questions about the status of those not born to citizenship of a particular nation. In addition, for citizenship to be considered ‘natural’ suggests that it is clear cut – that one either is or is not a citizen, where belonging and identity are set up as a series of binary characteristics. Yet belonging is always more complicated than this binary structure. As will be discussed in the next chapter, a series of other characteristics and exclusions (including those based on age, gender, sexuality, class, race, dis/ability) affects citizenship claims.

This book focuses on the legal moment of making citizens, asking how the ceremonial rituals which have been created around the act of endowing citizenship construct the citizen and the nation. However, it is important to acknowledge that this is only one route into the politics of citizenship, and it is a particularly narrow route in three specific ways. Firstly, in the focus on formal membership, there is always a risk of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), in which the nation-state is taken as the primary unit of analysis. Many different forms of mobility are not shaped primarily by the social and political force of the nation-state. In addition, there are many forms of movement, attachment and belonging that cannot be readily conceptualised (or even made visible) if national identity and membership, or crossing state-borders, are the focus of analysis. National identity and belonging may be much less significant in people’s lives than other forms of attachment and identification. Secondly, there is the additional risk that we may be co-opted by the state’s focus on citizenship, migration status and the notions of illegal and legal migration. It is important to remember that illegality is created through state legislation, rather than it somehow being inherent to (or an inevitable consequence of) human mobility (De Genova 2007).

Finally, the focus on citizenship as membership, which is the central concern of this book, is not the only way that it can be – or should be – thought of (Stephens and Squire 2012). For Engin Isin, it is possible to think of ‘citizens without frontiers’, particularly if we focus on citizenship as the acting (rather than moving) subject (Isin 2012a). These ‘citizenship acts’ are able to cross the borders of citizenship by subjects acting as citizens, even where the state may not recognise them as such (Isin and Nielsen 2008). This is a form of citizenship which rejects – or in Isin’s terms ‘transverses’ – state borders and state definitions. Acts of citizenship frequently involve the voicing of rights and claims which go beyond the national frame (such as the anti-apartheid movement or the activities of Greenpeace or WikiLeaks). They also involve contesting both borders and normative frames. For Isin, ‘a fundamental feature of a citizenship act is that it exercises either a right that does not exist or a right that does exist but which is enacted by a political subject who does not exist in the eyes of the law’ (Isin 2012a: 13). This approach to citizenship acts is exciting because of the ways it can challenge definitions of what citizenship is and who can be citizens. It provides a critical frame which recognises agency in those who are often seen as lacking it (such as undocumented migrants) as well as a structure for understanding actions which challenge the nation-state formation. This approach also draws attention to the different levels on which citizenship may be enacted – those above the level of the nation, such as claims to regional (for example, European) citizenship, as well as at the sub-national level, such as of the region, city or more local community.

However, it is also worth remembering that not all citizen acts may be as progressive as those generally discussed in this literature. How can we understand international far-right organising and activities within this framework? Are actions that seek to close off citizenship to others also citizen acts? For instance, Cynthia Weber (Weber 2012), in her examination of activism around the US-Mexican border, explores the practices of the Minutemen, who are challenging the state to secure the border, and taking the right upon themselves where they feel the state has failed (see also discussion in Isin 2012a: 47). At the same time, other activists, in organisations such as ‘No More Deaths’ and ‘Humane Borders’, are highlighting and trying to prevent the many deaths which occur among those trying to cross the border (Weber 2012). It would be worth exploring further how these different approaches fit into the frame of citizen acts. In addition, the idea of citizen acts itself still relies on normative notions of citizenship. Isin defines citizen acts by the absence of state recognition that the actor is a citizen or that the right is a legal claim. So here again we return to the question of citizenship as state membership or belonging. Whilst the potentially transgressive quality of citizen acts also helps illuminate the closures and exclusions of normative citizenship, this book argues that the normative frame remains an important concern, not least for the real effect that it has on everyday lives. As will be discussed further in Chapters 5 and 6, interviews with new citizens in the UK show that they engage in citizen acts which make claims to citizenship predating state recognition or grants of formal rights. They also draw on other forms of belonging: to cities or to other affiliations, such as those forged through colonialism. These claims can be understood to counter or transverse the borders of state membership.

This book is particularly concerned with the question of ‘new’ citizenship: the state citizenship produced by the transnational movements and settlements of people. It involves the granting of citizenship to people who do not have it by virtue of where they were born or the status of their parents. Importantly, this citizenship status appears to have an ‘in/out’ quality to it. One cannot be ‘slightly’ or ‘almost’ a citizen – although with the introduction of ideas of ‘probationary’ citizenship, and the gradual increase of rights for those who are granted forms of permanent residency, the ‘almost’ citizens begin to emerge (Soysal 1995). National state citizenship is inherently dependent on the ability to identify those who are not of-the-nation – the strangers or aliens. The citizen is known at least partly in her/his differentiation from the non-citizen. In the modern era, states have been developing technologies to differentiate between them. Whilst initially, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, the main focus was on controlling the mobility of citizens, increasingly states have focused on their power to detect, exclude and expel non-citizens as well as to enable surveillance of citizens who are considered a threat to the state. The boundaries of citizenship are often framed in national terms: ‘citizenship is meant to be universalistic and above cultural difference, yet it exists only in the context of a nation-state, which is based on cultural specificity – on the belief in being different from other nations’ (Castles and Davidson 2000: 12).

As ‘new’ citizens are often citizens of two (or more) states, the granting of citizenship also raises questions of dual citizenship and its relationship to nationality and national identity. Internationally, there appear to be two conflicting trends in response to migration, particularly by Western states. On the one hand, there is increasing acceptance of dual citizenship, with many countries now accepting (either legally or in practice) that their citizens may also be citizens of other countries.⁷ At the same time, in an era of securitisation and in the political context of the ‘War on Terror’, certain categories of individuals with dual or multiple citizenships are subject to particular levels of scrutiny and suspicion. They can also be left vulnerable because of gaps in the protection that states will offer them, or some states’ willingness to deport them (Stasiulis and Ross 2006; Walters 2002). The context for these conflicting responses to dual citizenship is a general retreat from discourses of multiculturalism and a return to those of integration – which is often a euphemism for assimilation – particularly fuelled by the figure of the dangerous ‘homegrown’ terrorist (Meer 2010; Meer and Modood 2014). Citizenship is wielded as one part of the armoury of the securitised state ‘enabling specific groups and populations to be legitimately targeted and criminalised as non-citizens or failing citizens’ (Tyler 2010: 65). At the same time, the figures that are presented of the ‘good’ and worthy citizen and the abject intruder have often been developed on the model of older patterns of colonial binary discourses of colonized and colonizer, Orient and Occident, or North and South (Isin 2012c).

This book is concerned with the moment of ‘making’ new citizens – the endowing of citizenship by the state on individuals who have migrated. Thus, this approach to citizenship also has movement and mobility, as well as immobility, at its heart. These new citizens are not born to the citizenship which they are acquiring; they have moved towards it. Obtaining new citizenship is often shaped by a desire to stay, as it gives the right of residence. But it is also often accompanied by the desire to move – to be able to move across national borders with more ease and with the assurance that they can return. New citizens, how they come to be citizens, what conditions they have to fulfil to acquire citizenship, and how they are received by the state and society of their new nations can tell us much about citizenship itself. As Ratna Kapur argues, ‘the migrant subject is deeply implicated in the constitution of citizenship, of who counts and who does not’ (Kapur 2007: 539).

In particular, this book explores the nature of citizenship ceremonies, which have become a part of the citizenship regimes of an increasing number of countries but have rarely been researched. Ceremonies seek to endow the moment of granting full citizenship to migrants with a public – or semi-public – ritual. The creation of a ritual to ‘make’ citizens also provides an opportunity to assert what citizenship and nationality mean in particular places and at particular times. These i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Bounded Citizenship
• 3  Taking the Oath
• 4  Europe Welcomes
• 5  Routes to Citizenship
• 6  Welcome to Britain?
• 7  Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index