Description
Naturalization is the final moment of state control over migrants’ access to full membership status. Previously, naturalization was a closed administrative procedure and largely dealt with through paperwork, in writing, by caseworkers in state departments who examine applications and take decisions from their desks. The introduction of citizenship tests, courses, and ceremonies in several European countries since the 2000s significantly changed the citizenship admission process. Naturalization has become a specific regime of subject-formation suggesting that migrants should optimize themselves towards a particular subjectivity, the “Super Citizen” (Badenhoop 2017). The tests, courses, and ceremonies created new encounters between citizenship applicants and newly involved state actors such as registrars or teachers. Unlike traditional state actors who have the formal power to grant or reject citizenship, the professionals who enact citizenship courses or ceremonies have a more symbolic power in educating and addressing citizenship applicants at the beginning and end of the process. Yet, the role of these street-level bureaucrats as “stage directors” and “experts” is crucial in shaping subject-formation processes (Bröckling 2007). This paper sheds light on the various actors who implement and govern naturalization procedures, examining how these authorities are themselves governed and how they exercise their role in the interaction with citizenship applicants. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews in Germany and the UK, this paper shows that some of the newly involved state actors feel highly ambivalent about their given task to make new citizens while other, new and traditional actors actively reinforce the call for the Super Citizen.
