Affective Naturalization: Practices of Citizenship Conferment

A Broader Understanding of Naturalization

The Black’s Law Dictionary explains naturalization ¹ in the following way: “To confer citizenship upon an alien; to make a foreigner the same, in respect to rights and privileges, as if he were a native citizen or subject.” The standard narrative of these words has only two characters, the state and the citizenship applicant, and the relationship between them is one way, as the core of the story is that the state grants citizenship to the individual who passes the criteria. It also has a clear beginning and end in the application and the acquisition of citizenship: nothing precedes or follows it.

I argue that we need to broaden our understanding of naturalization, in order to capture the full meaning and weight of naturalization policy. This involves challenging the standard narrative’s main points. First, the relationship between the state and the applicant should not be seen as merely unidirectional because the criteria used for naturalization are in an important sense reflective of reigning ideals. Since naturalization, unlike nationality acquired at birth, is neither automatic nor accidental, it seems clear that “…the way naturalizations are organized in any society offers a particular opportunity to gain clues as to which criteria are assumed to be relevant for the respective definition of national belonging” (Schwarz, 2015, p. 3). And as they ultimately express what the people, assumedly, take to be important, the criteria will reflect back on their own self-understanding. It is not possible in the longer run to sustain radically different ideals on “good citizenship” for natives and for applicants: Do we require a certain educational or economic level for foreigners, for instance, this will ultimately have a bearing on with what we require from “our own.”

Second, the assumption that naturalization is transitory also needs to be qualified. Historians see time in general as fateful, “…in the sense that an action, once taken, or an event, once experienced, cannot be obliterated. It is lodged in the memory of those whom it affects and therefore irrevocably alters the situation in which it occurs” (Sewell, 2005, pp. 6–7). Naturalization needs to be seen as constitutive of social relations and not merely a transient process. Practices of naturalization signal to both applicants and citizens what kind of loyalty and mutual bonds they are expected to enact and therefore have effects that far overstretch the individual legal process. Precisely because naturalization is constitutive of social relations more generally, the terms on which it occurs are tremendously important. For instance, if requirements are very demanding, they foster a view of citizenship as based on achievements, which actually runs counter to democratic ideals and that ultimately will affect the citizenry at large. In order to broaden the understanding of naturalization in this way, I will now turn to theories on affect and politics.

Affective Naturalization

In this section, I develop the notion affective naturalization. First, I will discuss some aspects of the political governance of emotions more generally, drawing on literature on emotions and politics. I will then turn specifically to the subject of naturalization, arguing that naturalization processes are structured through a staging of a relationship of desire and that they reenact the social contract myth of voluntary consent.

With the “affective turn,” the social sciences have been alerted to the emotional dimension of their inquiries in a wider manner than has previously been the case (Berlant, 2011; McCalman & Pickering, 2010; Ticineto Clough & Halley, 2007). The important role of emotions for politics was known in antiquity, and it was also acknowledged and investigated by modern classic authors such as Baruch Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu (Hardt, 2007). But in contemporary political studies, the topic has been all but completely ignored. The reason is that emotions have traditionally been perceived as opposed to rationality, the meta-value of science that enjoys a particularly strong standing in political science in comparison to other disciplines of social science and humanities. It is therefore only quite recently that political science has been touched by the affective turn in social studies (Hall & Ross, 2015; Hoggett & Thompson, 2012). ²

Emotions are always directed toward something—toward an object that can be either real or imagined, or concrete or abstract. Emotions are not only shaped by that object but at the same time contribute to shaping it. Julia Kristeva has for instance argued that “the nation” is the product of the shared affect among people moving toward it (cf. Ahmed, 2004, pp. 7, 133). This view is distinct from the everyday assumption of emotions as purely interior, psychological states. Emotions are to a considerable degree shaped by social practices, as are the “I” or the “we” that are perceived to be holding these emotions in the first place (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 8–10; Hochschild, 2003; Hoggett & Thompson, 2012). This means that while emotions are our innermost feelings, they are open to molding from outside social and political forces—and it is this combination that makes them politically significant (cf. Fields, Copp, & Kleinman, 2006, p. 156; Peterson, 2006; Reddy, 2001, p. 124). ³

The relevance of emotions in the present context is the ways in which they are subject to political maneuvering and adaptation in practices of naturalization. Citizenship and naturalization are political institutions, and as such, they do not only reflect existing values in society; they also mold expectations and behavior of individuals. As Gerth and Wright Mills (1953, p. 173) note, “[i]nstitutions not only select people and eject them; institutions also form them…[they] imprint their stamps upon the individual, modifying his external conduct as well as his inner life.” Hochschield (2003) names the process through which this occurs at the level of emotions “emotion work” and explains that this can be done “by the self upon the self, by the self upon others and by others upon oneself” (p. 96). Emotion work takes place in relation to norms that tell us what the correct emotion, and the correct expression of this emotion, is in a given situation. At one level, we may behave in the expected manner while feeling something entirely differently—then we conform outwardly but not inwardly. At another, deeper, level, we may work on the degree or the quality of the feeling itself, thus seeking to get our inner life to conform as well (Hochschield, 2003, pp. 90–95).

Emotions importantly mold relationships between people. Some emotions are socially integrative and others are divisive. Examples of the former are love, solidarity, and pride, while fear, shame, and envy exemplify the latter (Hoggett & Thompson, 2012, pp. 7–12). But emotions are also inherent in governing exercises and social milieus at the level of the state or the nation. Reddy’s (2001) term “emotional regime” corresponds to the emotional pattern of governing on which all political regimes are reliant: “[t]he set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime” (p. 129). ⁴

The term “affective citizenship” denotes how emotions are involved in the construction of citizenship. It covers how individuals are encouraged to feel toward each other and the nation, how politicians refer to emotions when defining good citizens, and how governing strategies are defined with affects in mind (Di Gregorio & Merolli, 2016; Fortier, 2016, 2017; Johnson, 2010, pp. 496–500). ⁵ Studies of affective citizenship have shown that policy makers draw on, construct, and partly instrumentalize affect in order to create ideal citizens and communities. Over the past few decades, such efforts have often been framed in terms of security, and the emphasis has been on securing societies from the assumed dangers of migration, constructing citizens as anxious and fearful, and underscoring the need for properly “integrated” communities (Bigo, 2002; Fortier, 2010, 2016; Isin, 2004; Weber, 2008).

The term affective citizenship can be narrowed even further in order to be useful in the current context. We can provisionally use the term affective naturalization for the feelings of loyalty, obligations, and rightful claims that new citizens are encouraged to feel and enact toward the new state, fellow citizens, former conationals, and themselves, including through emotional forms of self-governance. Such an analysis may grasp important facets of a state’s naturalization policy—how it projects, enacts, and/or embodies the hopes and anxieties that circulate in society (Hoggett & Thompson, 2012, pp. 6–7). We may distinguish between the general social, symbolic, and affective framework that all forms of naturalization share and the specific meanings of different modes of naturalization—for instance, whether citizenship is bought or achieved.

There are two noticeable characteristics of how naturalization is emotionally staged at the general level, which have been exposed in queer scholarship. One concerns the way it sets up a relationship of desire, and the second is how it enacts the modern myth of a contract. I will discuss them one after the other.

Naturalization processes have a performative character (Fortier, 2013). They stage the relationship between state and applicant as one where the latter seeks the former’s approval. This way, naturalization does not only confer citizenship upon a person, but it also produces a multidimensional relationship of desire. The applying immigrant is constructed as a subject desiring membership, and at the same time, the state (“we”) is constructed as desirable and somewhat exclusive. This strengthens the state’s legitimacy, as its attractiveness to others increases its desirability in the eyes of its own population. The immigrant needs to demonstrate love and desire for state membership, in order to be perceived as a “good” applicant. The emotional work thus required may sometimes be limited to “lip service” but sometimes requires deeper manifestations of commitment and allegiance. The most problematic groups in discourses on naturalization are therefore those that refuse naturalization: those who do not apply, those who go underground, those who stick to their old language and habits, or in other ways appear not to desire the state/“us” (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 134–137; Fortier, 2013).

Naturalization processes also perform the modern myth of the state as founded on voluntary consent rather than involuntary ascription. This becomes clear when naturalization is compared to birthright citizenship:

Birthright citizenship is a non-consensual means of granting citizenship, linked to feudal, hierarchical models of allegiance. In contrast, naturalization is understood as a consensual process of conferring citizenship, associated with Lockean and later Enlightenment models of a contractual relationship between citizen and state […]. Unlike birthright citizenship, then, naturalized citizenship is produced through this self-conscious, presumably voluntary declaration of the citizen’s agreement to the terms of this contract with the state. (Somerville, 2005, p. 662)

Naturalization processes enact the myth of voluntary consent, which in democratic founding myths blends into the topic of the self-constituting, self-governing people. Where else is this to be observed than in naturalization processes today, and where is it more visible than in the citizenship ceremonies that more and more countries now have adopted? What is celebrated there is not just that the individual immigrants present have acquired the status of citizenship. It is also a celebration of the myth of a voluntarily consenting people. To have such ceremonies at regular intervals therefore serves to reinvigorate that myth and thereby to legitimize state power (Byrne, 2017; Honig, 2001, p. 75).

The Social Meaning of Different Citizenship Conferment Practices

We have now established that naturalization processes have the effect of legitimizing the state, both by enacting the symbolism of voluntary consent and by constructing a relationship of desire between state and individual applicant. In the following section, I will present different existing modes of conveying citizenships, conceptualized as differing examples of how the state more precisely requites immigrants’ desire. Before that, I will say something more general about conceiving of naturalization in economic transfer terms, using insights from economic anthropology. ⁶ The upshot is the suggestion to treat citizenship not only in terms of status, rights, and identity, which is the most common (Joppke, 2010), but also as a kind of “thing” whose transfer and distribution matter.

The starting point of economic anthropology is that “commodities, like persons, have social lives” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 3). At its most basic, it is the “description and analysis of economic life, using an anthropological perspective” (Carrier, 2005, p. 1; Hann, 1998; Narotzky, 1997). Economic life includes everything related to how people produce, consume, and circulate things and provide for themselves. This may sound far removed from how we are used to think of citizenship—as membership in a political community, in terms of status, rights, and identity (Joppke, 2010). But “things” here does not just signify goods but has a broader meaning: “It includes material objects, but also includes the immaterial: labour, services, knowledge and myth, names and charms and so on” (Carrier, 2005, pp. 3–4). Then, how do we know what “things” are of relevance and particularly whether citizenship qualifies? Carrier (2005) continues: “[I]n different times and places, different ones of these will be important resources in social life, and when they are important they come within the purview of economic anthropologists” (p. 4). In other words, if citizenship is an important resource, its forms of provisioning, distribution, and circulation become of relevance for economic anthropology. Now, it seems beyond doubt that citizenship is an important resource, particularly citizenship in democratic high-income states (Shachar, 2009). Milanovic (2016) calls the advantage of having been born in a richer state “citizenship premium” and argues that this determines two thirds of one’s lifetime incomes. Citizenship can therefore be seen as an “independent axis of social inequality in the contemporary world” (Kipnis, 2004, p. 257)—an important resource no doubt.

The notion of economic exchange, which is all-pervasive in this literature, suggests that something is given in return for something else. Thing X moves from Person A to Person B, and Thing Y moves from B to A. This can take many forms: Gift exchange and market exchange are two examples. To what extent can citizenship conferment be seen as a form of exchange? This appears as a central yet difficult question. One answer is that there is no exchange, as a citizenship status granted could not possibly be returned by the individual. If that is the case, we here have a case of one-way economic transfer rather than exchange (Hunt, 2005). Another position, toward which I am inclined, is to argue that citizenship conveyance is nevertheless a form of exchange. No individual can, of course, return something of comparable value to the state—but that does not seem theoretically necessary for the definition. The individual does arguably return something. The most obvious are the material and legal obligations (pay taxes, follow the laws, defend the country) that follow from citizenship status. In the country cases that still prohibit dual nationality, the individual also “returns” by giving up the obligations and loyalties that followed with the previous nationality. But he or she also contributes emotional returns by demonstrating appropriate expressions of love, desire, and gratitude, thus living up to the expectations on newly admitted citizens.

The conferment practices associated with naturalization need to be contrasted to birthright citizenship. No matter whether acquired through blood (jus sanguinis) or place of birth (jus soli), birthright citizenship is citizenship by ascription, in contrast to naturalization, which is citizenship by consent. It is by far the most common citizenship conferment practice. Citizenship then takes the form of inherited property as the transfer occurs on intimate terms between parent and child, bearing moreover the seal of the state (Shachar, 2009). As such, it has various affective correlates. One is security, in the sense that children thus acquire a level of protection against statelessness and other contingencies, no matter talents or merits (Carens, 2016). But another is a sense of injustice, for exactly the same reasons, which is felt most deeply by those left outside. The controversy is that a citizenship in a rich and well-functioning state has great benefits for one’s life chances, and at the same time, it is so arbitrarily distributed (Shachar, 2009). ⁷

Another distinction between birthright citizenship and naturalization is that the former represents “seemingly ‘natural’ or organic forms of the production of citizens through sexual reproduction,” while naturalization represents the production of citizens through consent and speech acts and with no necessary bonds to ancestry and sexuality (Somerville, 2005, p. 663). The term “naturalization” suggests that it is the biological reproduction of the citizenry that represents the normal state of affairs, into which immigrants (and their descendants in generations to come) are invited to join.

I now move on to naturalization. We will look directly at some ways in which citizenship is conferred in naturalization processes. While there are many varied ways, we will only engage with three: giving, buying, and deserving. ⁸ In each one, I distinguish between the mode and its affective dimension. The different conferment practices are treated here in a somewhat monolithic fashion, in order to be analytically clear. But the affective meaning of a certain practice may change between different points in time, and it should therefore be noted that it cannot be once and for all determined. The reader is therefore asked to keep in mind that the practices and their emotional correlates do not take place in pure form, that they may change, and also that the theories on which the analysis draws is more nuanced and refined.

The different practices of naturalization are theorized as different examples of how the state more precisely requites immigrants’ desire as explained above. The argument here is that they each contribute to create different types of relationships and identities, both between state and new citizen and social relationships more generally.

(a) Giving citizenship

The United States and some European countries have at a series of occasions launched regularization programs for undocumented migrants. Regularization programs secure a legal status for those who lack it and ultimately open up the path to citizenship, which had previously been closed. Such programs are often presented as a solution to the vulnerability of these migrants, as their undocumented status exposes them to all sorts of exploitation, violence, and discrimination (Levinson, 2005). Here, I argue that regularization is offered as a kind of gift from “us” to “them”: It signifies an ultimate inclusion into the political community for no other reason than the ambition to relieve suffering and admit responsibility for a vulnerable group. ⁹ There is usually no requirement that the migrants have accomplished something or that they are in possession of particular resources or skills. Surely, they usually need to provide evidence that they have lived and/or worked in the country for a determined number of years, which means that regularization is not given freely and without any restrictions. But on the other hand, as modern anthropology has shown, this can be said of any gift: Gift giving is never a wholly disinterested act (Mauss, 2002).

Another example is when citizenship is conferred to stateless people. Such inclusion provides the fundamental “right to have rights” for those that lack it, and that are relegated to a “bare life” existence in Giorgio Agamben’s terms (Buckel & Wissel, 2010). In that sense, it is similar to birthright citizenship, but in the case of stateless people, it is conferred in the form of a gift rather than as inheritance. It is a general observation that when naturalization is motivated by humanitarian concerns, like in regularization, it tends to take the form of a gift.

What characterizes a gift relationship? The traditional Western idea is that gift giving is an unselfish transaction between giver and recipient, in which the material value of the gift is beside the point, and, most importantly, in which there is no obligation to either give or to reciprocate (Yan, 2005, p. 257). This idea was thoroughly challenged by Marcel Mauss and in the manifold discussions in economic anthropology that followed upon the publication of his major work The Gift in 1925 (Mauss, 2002). Mauss demonstrated that gifts are instead part of a larger societal cycle of giving and reciprocating that create mutually dependent ties and relationships of solidarity and trust. At its core is the principle of reciprocity, which Mauss (2002) calls “the spirit of the thing given” (p. 13). If the recipient does not or is not permitted to return, the gift is put outside of any social bonds (Douglas, 2002, p. ix).

The emotional correlate is gratitude. The superior position of the giver is a pan cultural phenomenon, as the one who receives is put in a position of expected thankfulness (Yan, 2005, p. 251). Gratitude thus entails that the other is indebted to us (Ahmed, 2004, p. 193). Giving a gift creates obligations: “it is a way to possess, by creating people obliged to reciprocate” (p. 94). The degree of obligation has to do with the power relation between the participants, as Pierre Bourdieu argued. To give a gift between equals establishes solidarity and creates social ties. But when it occurs between unequal partners, it may reinforce relations of domination (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 100). The conferment of citizenship is clearly a case of vertical gift exchange and hence belongs to the latter category (Yan, 2005, p. 247). This may explain the public outrage that sometimes is stirred when immigrants are seen as not expressing enough gratitude or not expressing it in an appropriate way. What infuriates is “the failure of migrants to ‘return’ the love of the nation through gratitude” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 137).

Hochschild (2003) writes that for the economy of gratitude to work, it is necessary that the parties have a similar interpretation of the matter, so that “what feels like a gift to one person feels like a gift to another”—otherwise, the gift may be “mis-received” (p. 105). In our context, this may occur when an immigrant feels she or he has the right to citizenship—either because of the sufferings she or he has had or because of his or her contribution through his or her labor or because of prior exploitative and colonial relations between the countries—and therefore fails to receive it in a way the giver feels appropriate.

This can be illustrated through a story from the first time that citizenship ceremonies were arranged in Sweden, on National Day, June 6, 2015. Somar Al Naher is a guest columnist in the social democratic newspaper Aftonbladet. In her column the day before, she retells the story of how she arrived with her family as a refugee in the 1980s and their sufferings and degrading treatment in the prolonged asylum application process. “I want an excuse, not a ceremony,” she writes. This infuriates former migration minister, now First Deputy Speaker in the Swedish parliament Tobias Billström. At his Facebook page, he directs these words to her: “OK. So you don’t need to sing the national anthem tomorrow [….] But you know what, Somar? I think you should show a little gratitude. Gratitude that there are countries such as Sweden that do care.” He appears to feel that her obligation to demonstrate gratitude still holds after 26 years and that it even extends to her professional position: “If the Swedish state had not approved yours and your family’s asylum application in 1989, then would you be where you are today, at the editorial team of Aftonbladet? You should think about that before you start writing your next column.” In a follow-up, Al Naher explains that to get refuge from war and persecution is a human right and “not a ground for eternal debt of gratitude,” to which Billström chooses not to reply (Pehrson, 2015).

A reflection is that those that are more likely to suffer public hostility for “not being thankful enough” often are among the most vulnerable categories of migrants. Those that get their status for humanitarian reasons rather than as an entitlement or for qualifications are more likely to be seen as misreceiving their status.

(b) Buying citizenship

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for easier access to citizenship among the wealthy. This has spurred the emergence of “citizenship and residence planning” as a service provided by globally active consultancy firms such as Henley & Partners and Arton Capital. Such firms provide advice to two groups of actors. One is the wealthy individuals and their families. These globally mobile people have access to resources (economic especially, but also social), which allows them a great liberty from restrictions. The wealthy classes have always had more access to freedom of movement (Bauman, 1998; Mau, 2010), but what is new is that they also have a greater choice as regards citizenship. The mentioned consultancy firms for a charge advise them of existing rules and regulations as regards investment requirements, citizenship laws, and taxation, so that they can make informed choices about what citizenship works best to their advantage (Abrahamian, 2015; Shachar, 2017). The second group that benefits from the services of these consultancy firms are states themselves. They turn to consultancy firms to get advice on how to change their naturalization laws in order to attract the desired investors. The result is a trend toward “investment-based citizenship and residency programs” in the European Union and elsewhere (Dzankic, 2015; Parker, 2016). Malta, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Austria, and Cyprus are examples of countries with citizenship-by-investment programs. Many other states sell permanent residence this way, most of which can lead to citizenship (Henley & Partners, 2017). ¹⁰

This is hence a growing citizenship conferment practice, and as one may expect, it has quickly become subject to a normative debate. That debate concerns on the one hand matters of equality. To buy citizenships is expensive and therefore only possible for the very wealthy, which obviously seems unfair. However, the industry argues that investment citizenship is actually more than just allotting privileged status by the lottery of birth as it is currently done. Christian Kälin, the CEO of the mentioned firm Henley & Partners, argues: “Of course it’s only for the wealthy, but that’s not any more of an arbitrary criteria [sic] than any other that we currently use to allocate citizenship…. If you can fulfill those criteria you can become a citizen” (Abrahamian, 2015, p. 109). Many scholars are however worried that this practice will widen global inequalities since it both presupposes and contributes to class-based and nationality-based disparities (see Barbulescu, 2014; Mavelli, 2018; Shachar, 2017; Shachar & Bauböck, 2014).

The normative debate also revolves around the commodification of citizenship. The two topics (inequality and commodification) tend to be entangled but can in principle be separated. When it comes to commodification, it is not the price tag of citizenship that is criticized but the overall practice of conferring it through market mechanisms. Dzankic (2012) writes in the context of investment citizenship about ius pecuniae: The relationship between individual and state is that of consumer and seller—not just metaphorically but actually. Instead of being offered as a gift or a birthright, when citizenship is bought, it takes the form of a commodity. “Commodification,” writes Sammond (2007, p. 609), “refers to the removal of an object (or person) from a (theoretical) realm outside the social relations of production and its seemingly forcible incorporation into market relations.” Many thinkers have reacted sharply against commodification. Sandel (2012) scrutinizes the trade in organs, personal safety, political influence, and so on, in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (see also Satz, 2012). He argues that “The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by non-market norms, is one of the most significant developments of our time” (Sandel, 2012, p. 7). The reason that we find the commodification of some things more upsetting than others is that we instinctively feel that it degrades them because some things must be valued in different ways than through the market. Moreover, markets are not neutral but actively change perceptions and attitudes, so when we sell some things (kidneys, surrogacy, votes) we promote a bad attitude toward them (Sandel, 2012, p. 15).

Selling citizenship is a very conspicuous form of commodification. The state itself produces this “good” that is then put on the market. What it sells in this case is foundational for itself: membership in the political community. The commodification of citizenship risks to weaken and destroy social bonds, and it does so through marketizations promotion of self-interested and calculative indifference, which is the affective correlate. Many authors have described the cold indifference that accompanies commodification in general, perhaps most famously Marx and Engels. The bourgeoisie, they claimed, “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest…. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value and, in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade” (Marx & Engels, 1988, p. 211). On the specific topic of citizenship by investment, Tanasoca (2016) has insightfully written that the core problem is that it does not foster “communal reciprocity,” that is, the felt responsibilities and obligations that arise from long-term involvement with a community and that citizenship traditionally have been supposed to promote. In gift relationships, the reciprocity is continuous, but in market exchange, the reciprocity is one-off: It ends with the cash payment. Investment citizenship hence fosters action orientations that are very far from the ideal of democratic citizenship:

Having acquired their citizenship through the market, investors might follow the same market logic in their citizen capacity. If so…when citizenship is no longer profitable to them, investors could simply defect. They may likely transfer their capital elsewhere and forget all about the special duties they had qua citizens. In the market, dissatisfaction is expressed by exit. In democracies it is supposed to be expressed through voice. Investors will prefer exit to voice if they act as consumers, not as citizens. (Tanasoca, 2016, pp. 179–180)

(c) Deserving citizenship

A clear trend in the past few years is that more and more countries have tightened their citizenship requirements. Most countries have always had some form of “good character” requirement, usually understood in a narrow way as the absence of criminal record. But now, the emphasis is on introducing language and civic integration tests (Goodman, 2010). The restrictive trend is particularly notable in Europe and English-speaking New World countries. ¹¹ UK is one example. Before, citizenship was acquired through a postal application, but the process has now become much more demanding and complex. The applicant must demonstrate language skills as well as knowledge about the culture and lifestyle. She must also attend a ceremony in which it is obligatory to swear loyalty to the monarchy (Cole, 2010, pp. 15–16). In the Netherlands, the applicant needs to pass the language and integration tests even before she arrives (Shachar, 2014, p. 118). The concept of “earned citizenship” has thus entered the vocabulary in the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands (Joppke, 2013, p. 2).

The tests demonstrate that the values of multicultural difference and tolerance that were central in political debates in the 1980s and 1990s are no longer central for citizenship policy. That ideal has been inversed so that we now talk instead of “shared values” and “civic integration” (Shachar, 2014, p. 118). The new citizens need to prove that they deserve inclusion by showing that they adapt and are ready to become like “us.” When studying for the tests, the new citizen engages in an arduous “labour of love” for the new country, to use Ahmed’s (2004) term (p. 134). They prove that they are devoted, willing to put down the effort, and that they have the capacity to do so. When passing such tests, they therefore demonstrate that they desire us in the way we want them to (cf. Somerville, 2005). Joppke (2013) therefore rightly interprets this naturalization practice as a victory for a conservative position on citizenship (p. 3).

There are also other ways in which citizenship appears as something that one has earned or deserved. More and more countries tend to award those of extraordinary talent and/or entrepreneurship capacities with fast lanes to visas, residence, and finally citizenship. These outstanding individuals may be, for instance, sportsmen, movie stars, scientists, or industrialists. This may appear annoying or unjust, or fully legitimate, depending on one’s point of view. In any case, it is here a question of making exceptions, and it is therefore quite different from when states introduce tests and adopt merit-based point system as part of their regular process, so that desert becomes a core criterion for naturalization overall (Shachar, 2016).

When citizenship is deserved, it takes on a similar meaning to a prize or—perhaps a better analogy—a professional recognition like the “bar exam” which jurists in the United States must pass in order to practice law. With language and integration tests, and with point system–based citizenship rules, the applicant individual has to prove that she has what it takes to be included in political community. The tests show who merits inclusion and who doesn’t—their function is selective. This mode of conferment corresponds to emotions of worthiness and rightful privilege.

This view of citizenship is so reflective of the dominant neoliberal ideology, and its emphasis on merit, that it is usually not considered controversial. The citizen ideal that it mirrors is that of an individual who is skillful at turning his or her talents and resources into something that benefits both herself and the society that she seeks to join. This ideal is free from explicit biases regarding race, gender, and national origin, which is part of the reason that it fits so well into the current political climate. But there is something quite radical about conferring citizenship on merit terms. It challenges the notion of equal citizenship which holds that citizenship should be assigned to people no matter their talents, merits, aptitudes, or accomplishments. Citizenship is from this perspective not something one should earn, something on which one needs to be worthy, but a fundamental right. The merit-oriented approach to citizenship therefore demonstrates a sea change in the view of citizenship from right to privilege (Näsström, 2019; Shachar, 2016). And, as with the other modes of conferment, it has implications for social relationships overall:

If having extraordinary talent or performing strongly on a point-system grid will come to signify the new hard-to-attain gold standard for allotting access to membership for those not born as citizens, then by process of osmosis of ideas and practices we may eventually witness its impact stretch and expand to other realms of decision-making about “who belongs,” and according to what criteria. (Shachar, 2016, p. 196)

Final Reflections

The argument of this text is that we need to go beyond the legal aspects of naturalization and recognize its affective dimensions. I have wanted to show that the practices whereby naturalization occurs matter, not only for the individual but for wider social and political relations and the construction of citizenship. I have paid particular attention to a few of them, by bringing economic anthropology to bear on the practices of giving, buying, and deserving citizenship. The usage of economic anthropology in this context seems to me extremely fruitful, since it is able to capture dimensions of the naturalization process that have so far not been uncovered. There is doubtless room for more, and more rigorous, studies of affective naturalization since only a limited number of transfer modes have been sketched here. The final part of the article lists a few important points to keep in mind when proceeding.

Firstly, practices of naturalization are constitutive of social relations more generally. We can understand this through the notion of a “boomerang effect.” Hannah Arendt wrote about how, during the period of imperialism, the European powers exported their own models and policies to the colonies. However, this was not a one-way relationship: Practices arising in colonial administration were traveling the other route back to the center and affected political and juridical relations there (Arendt, 1976, part II). ¹² The boomerang effect concept can help us grasp how the treatment of noncitizens may reverberate into treatment of citizens too: The ways in which we confer membership shapes the meaning of citizenship and will in the longer run shape citizenship ideals and the way we relate to each other more broadly. The citizen/noncitizen division is from this perspective of secondary importance to the various social meanings that we attach to it. ¹³ If citizenship is sold or deserved, for instance, will not only affect applicants but also have implications for how we judge ourselves. If we require extremely high performance from applicants, then this will over time become the standard measure for good/bad citizens as well. We can therefore see how affective naturalization effectively transcends the boundary between the external and internal spheres of citizenship (see Bosniak, 2006). Practices of naturalization therefore carry great political weight.

Second, it is important to be aware that states use several modes of conferment at once. There is hence no single practice of naturalization but many that go on simultaneously. Different emotive responses and reverberations are therefore set in motion at once.

Third, we need to keep in mind the importance of context. The affective meaning of naturalization practices may vary across time and space, in tandem with changes in the overarching emotional regime. We may want to keep in mind an example from birthright citizenship. We now tend to think of jus sanguinis as less liberal and more “backward” than jus soli, as its ethnonationalist connotations make it exclusionary and closed. But in the time of the French revolution, jus sanguinis signified a liberatory break with the old feudal order in which individuals were tied to the soil on which they were born (Weil, 2011, p. 617). With a change of time and context, the social meaning of this conferment practice has changed as well.

Fourth, we need to grasp how different groups experience naturalization and to which extent that varies. As we have seen, there is a great possibility that wealthy and well-merited applicants will have a very different affective response to naturalization than their less fortunate peers. For some, naturalization signals freedom and a “cosmopolitan” lifestyle, for others it is a very demanding process. This is not surprising, since powerful people tend to get emotional rewards besides money and status. For those at the top of social hierarchies, the world feels as a benign place, and it actually is, to them—as they are less targets of animosity than others and more exposed to glory, admiration, and popularity (Hochschield, 2003, p. 85). The experience of naturalization is no exception in this regard. When we ask questions of the practices of naturalization, we therefore need to ask ourselves “for whom?”