Citizenship and integration policies are located at the complex intersection of rights and nation building. Integration is increasingly a precondition to obtaining rights in several European states, and citizenship remains an important source of formal rights. However, citizenship remains linked to national belonging and integration is often coloured by references to national culture. Historical work on the formation of the concept of nation underlines three distinct processes (Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991). First, the content of ‘national cultures’ has in most cases been defined, often arbitrarily, between the 18th and 19th centuries, and projected to a distant past, as well as on territories and populations that were neither homogeneous nor clearly distinct from those of confining states. Second, such ‘national cultures’ have been widely promoted across the national territory through specific policies and especially education. Third, national belonging has been sacralized through reference to a shared culture and history that is mutually constituted with the sacralization itself.

Starting from these considerations it is clear how problematic it is examining whether a non-citizen is integrated or deserving and able to become a member of the nation. Although decades of cultural and educational policies have created a corpus of reference for the ‘national culture’, its definition remains vague and elusive. At the same time, the sacralization of national membership encourages restrictive ideas of how one can become a national.

Nevertheless, there are countries in which the issue of how one can become a national has been relatively simple in specific historical moments (at least in the letter of the law). In the case of Belgium, this was the situation between 2000 and 2012, a period characterized by a particularly inclusive nationality policy, where the fact itself of applying for nationality was considered proof of integration. The UK also had limited requirements for naturalization between 1948 and 2002, although the citizenship policy began to explicitly exclude (former) colonial subjects in 1962.

This book explores how integration and citizenship are implemented in practice in Belgium and the UK, and how the officers and operators charged with applying the policies manage this complex mandate. On the one hand, I analyse the letter of the policies and show how restrictive ideas of national culture and national belonging appear in the policies following the integrationist ideology (Kundnani, 2007; Kostakopoulou, 2010a; MacGregor and Bailey, 2012; Mouritsen and Olsen, 2013).