Blickpunkt Großbritannien Büro London The Chandlery Office 609 50 Westminster Bridge Road GB London SE1 7QY Tel 00 44 20 77 21 87 45 Fax 00 44 20 77 21 87 46 www.feslondon.org.uk May 2008 British citizenship: a debate of paradoxes In an attempt to overcome the historical-legal complexity of the concept citizenship in the context of the UK, the present Labour government has got caught between a long­standing yet newly rediscovered understanding of its social bonding function and a policy approach based on and pervaded by the outdated view of citizenship as a re­ward for assimilation. It needs to separate out two completely different discourses in order to be able to formulate coherent policies – both regarding long-standing citizens and newcomers. Anne Bostancı Introduction The current citizenship debate in the UK is a complex one that brings together a variety of legal, social, and political argu­ments. Based on complicated historical, legal idiosyncrasies of the concept and the country’s continuous efforts to come to terms with its past and present social and cultural reality(including the contentious debate around immigration), the present government continues to find it difficult to formulate a coherent approach to national­ity and citizenship both on a theoretical and a practical level despite the fact that much work has been done on it. Despite efforts to increase popular civic and democratic en­gagement in Labour’s over ten years in of­fice, this inability seems to result in ever greater public confusion of this topic with issues of immigration management and, alongside it, a general turn to simplistic ar­guments about belonging that are – shock­ingly – mirrored in government’s policy suggestions despite the fact that alterna­tive, more accurate and more sensible con­ceptualisations are available. The present paper first sketches the thoroughly confusing historical development of British nationality and citizenship. It is important to note here that this brief over­view hardly does justice to the wealth of particularities the legal concept contains, but mainly serves the purpose of illustrating its complexity and confusing terminology. Secondly, the paper refers to work commis­sioned by the current government in an at­tempt to come to terms with the concept, namely Lord Goldsmith’s Citizenship Re-