The limits of multicultural citizenship
In our weekend essay exploring some of the themes of The Academy 2025, Jacob Reynolds argues that a turn to ethnicity is no solution to the problem of who belongs.
The storm that erupted in the wake of an exchange between Konstantin Kisin and Fraser Nelson on who is English is one of the most potent recent examples of the total disarray of our contemporary political language, specifically the questions of citizenship and identity. As the convenor of an event this summer on precisely this question – Upheaval: Why politics needs a new language, which takes place on 5 & 6 July – the debate only served to illustrate the necessity of asking some tough questions.
Indeed, when a major British politician, Suella Braverman, can declare that she ‘will never be truly English’, it seems as if citizenship itself, a fundamental building block of our political life, is in total disarray. Indeed, Braverman’s intervention seems more marked by contemporary anxieties than any philosophical reflection. She insisted that the problem with the language of Englishness was the existence of ‘clashes on our streets between Hindus and Muslims’. At the same time, despite recognising ‘Britain, and particularly England, is in the throes of an identity crisis’, she made no attempt to disentangle British and English identity, continuing to throw together those uneasy bedfellows, ‘British values and English culture’.
Indeed, the concept of ‘British values’ lies at the heart of the problem. A citizenship rooted in these Blairite notions seems condemned to reek of those compulsory ‘citizenship’ classes we insist that schools teach.
At least part of the reason for this is that, in practical terms, citizenship actually means very little in contemporary Britain. Formally acquiring British (or more specifically, United Kingdom) citizenship is notably easier than many comparable countries. After as little as six years in the country, you can apply and, provided you pass a ‘life in the UK’ test that is no harder, in fact quite a lot easier, than the theory part of the driving test, you have citizenship.
But even if it were made harder to acquire, our citizenship would hardly become more valuable. About the only unique benefit that citizenship confers is the right to vote in national elections. This is not a small matter, but even without citizenship you are eligible for the full range of state benefits, effectively immune from deportation, able to access the full entitlements of the legal system, and able to adopt children or even run for office. And even the right to vote is, in light of the widespread degradation of political life, as the saying goes, not what it once was.
In fact, holding British citizenship doesn’t even entitle you to the normal legal protections of the British state. The lines from the opening pages of a British passport, which ask in the name of His Majesty’s government to provide all possible support to its bearer (and the implicit guarantee that, were one to come into trouble, His Majesty’s government would come to one’s aid) ring rather hollow today. In reality, His Majesty’s representatives can, at a whim, revoke your citizenship and authorise a drone strike on you (as happened to the ISIS ‘Beatles’), or revoke your citizenship and condemn you to eternity in a concentration camp (as has happened to Shamima Begum).
The reaction to a hollowed-out concept
In the wake of the devaluation of the content of citizenship, it is hardly surprising that radical voices have argued both that it ought to be made even more easier to deprive people of it (as in the case of the rape gangs), and that citizenship should be replaced by something more like ethnicity when it comes to deciding who is really British. Citizenship seems hardly an important matter, and so why not deprive people of it? Citizenship appears to be not a very demanding idea, and so don’t we need something else, such as ethnicity, to decide who the real British are? In other words, the appeal of ethnicity or skin colour seems to be that it fixed, immutable, exclusive.
Ethnic citizenship becomes, in an odd way, another ‘protected characteristic’ - just like how contemporary identitarians seek answers in the supposed truths of race. It is perhaps strange, then, that this new left resolutely refuses to consider race when it comes to citizenship. Instead, their answer goes in the opposite direction: they insist that anyone who happens to reside here is as much a citizen as anyone else.
Both these responses, as unappealing as they might be, acquire their plausibility not from conceptual considerations about the nature of citizenship but from the sociological fact that contemporary citizenship has become a rather trivial matter. If citizenship is just some kind of residency, then it is going to apply to a rather large group of people. And at the same time, it is hardly going to be able to do the job we want it to do, which is to mark the boundaries of the demos, those who make up, in the deepest sense, who we are.
Citizenship in Athens - and beyond
Historically, though, citizenship was not just a kind of residency. In its earliest formulation, ancient Athenians drew a three-part distinction between slaves, who have no active role in society, resident aliens (metics) who may trade (although at elevated tax rates) but not partake in the joys of polis-life (or even own land), and citizens (polítēs) who were the real stuff of Athens, partaking in self-government.
While the integration of foreigners was rare in Athens, it was the Ancient Romans who developed the concept of citizenship into something it was possible for outsiders acquire. Initially, Roman citizenship was, as Athenian citizenship, a jealously guarded privilege. But the Roman conquest of the Italian peninsula opened up a new debate about the limits of citizenship. Rome relied on the military power of allied or conquered Italian cities, who began to resent their status as dependent but second-class subjects. The result was the inclusion of allied Roman cities into the Roman citizenship – they could now take part in Roman political life.
But as the Republic fell apart at the seams, the concept of citizenship lost its political qualities. Caesar, who was to bring the republic to an end, conferred citizenship liberally, and Augustus and his successors formalised the process of granting citizenship in return for favours like military service. The scope of citizenship widened as its content watered down. The final move (hundreds of years later under Caracalla in 221AD) was to transform all subjects of the Roman Imperium to citizens, but largely so as to increase the tax base. As citizenship of the Imperium and the life of Rome slowly lost their political qualities – replaced at first by ever-growing accumulation by elites and later by attempts to shore up the empire by incorporating militarist foreigners – its scope expanded.
For much of the Middle Ages, citizenship was a largely forgotten concept. It survived in places in name, but only as an indication of social obligations, such as paying taxes. Even in Renaissance Italy, despite the theoretical rediscoveries of Machiavelli, the connection between citizenship and politics was weak at best.
Instead, the twin Revolutions in America and France did much to elaborate a new concept of citizenship.
Pre-revolutionary British society contained what might be called a wholly legal notion of citizenship: a freeborn Englishman was the bearer of certain rights, which could be defended through the courts. But the right to vote was not one of them. Similarly, the American revolutionaries tied political rights strictly to property. But the American revolutionary’s rediscovery of politics during their ‘sweet years’ of rebellion involved, at least at an implicit level, the elaboration of a broader notion of citizenship. The American people had, quite literally, enacted the social contract theories of their age. It was hard in theory, although acceptable in practise, to restrict the ‘contracting parties’ to only those owning property.
But it was the French Revolution that, in typical fashion, cut through these compromises. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (the addition of ‘the Citizen’ not without some note) declared that all men are born free and equal and that sovereignty belongs to the people, not the king. Citizenship was no longer a privilege, but a universal right tied to the nation. At its most radical, even colonial slaves were declared full citizens. But crucially, unlike the passive, legal citizenship of Imperial Rome, French revolutionary citizenship was active and participatory. Being a citizen meant not just having rights but also having duties – to fight for the Republic (mass conscription), to obey its laws, and to be politically engaged.
If Napoleon and ensuing reaction across Europe resulted in a more truncated form of citizenship, the cat was now out of the historical bag. Soon, the practical unification of nation, state and citizen would result in the theoretical unification of nationhood, citizenship and democracy.
Elites uneasy with the concept of citizenship
But citizenship was hardly welcomed as an active addition to national life. Waves of reaction attempted to truncate the meaning of citizenship. One of the many strategies devised by elites was, of course, the attack on social solidarity. It is this strategy which seems the conscious or unconscious purpose behind the defrayed idea of ‘multicultural citizenship’, which is at the roots of the contemporary perplexities of citizenship.
Policies of state multiculturalism were developed not just to manage a new kind of society, but also as a strategy of weakening the attachment that people held to their own national communities. The multicultural citizen would not be too attached to their past and their neighbours, instead encouraged to think in terms of the ‘global context’. Mass immigration was justified on precisely these terms. Immigration was not just an economic necessity, but ‘enriching’ as such – it challenged the stubborn attachment people had to what was called a parochial national culture.
In this context, what we saw was the neutering of the concept of citizenship, making it either ineffective, undemanding, unexceptional or, ultimately, unreal. At the same time, especially under the guise of pro-immigration policies, it became open to more and more people. In our time, then, the scope of citizenship has been progressively expanded while its meaning has been emptied.
Somewhat ironically, it was the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ who were one of the casualties of the multicultural approach to citizenship. Many of this generation - who sought in ordinary British life a route to a proper sense of Britishness - were later found out when they hadn’t taken the state’s preferred bureaucratic approach to acquiring the right kinds of paper. It was the piece of paper, not being embedded in real British life, which marked out citizenship for the new multicultural approach of the British elite.
It is this history which seems long forgotten in contemporary debates about citizenship, which veer between an ethnic essentialism and an empty multiculturalism. The revival of rather ugly, racial understandings of ‘Englishness’ are based less on a firm conviction about the nature of citizenship than a reaction to the obvious inadequacies of globalist conceptions of the citizen. What is left out of the debate is any concept of the political dimension of citizenship – its relationship to the question of who we are and what kind of society we are trying to build.
However overdue, it is time we cut through the perplexities of the current moment and thought afresh about what citizenship really is. This is something we will begin to do at this year’s Academy. I hope you will join us.
The Academy 2025:
Upheaval: Why Politics Needs a New Language
Saturday 5 & Sunday 6 July
Wyboston Lakes Resort, Bedfordshire
Organised by Ideas Matter
Join us for a residential weekend of bold ideas, lectures and discussion.
The old world is crumbling, but its ideas refuse to die. Conservatism, socialism, liberalism – words drained of meaning, invoked like empty incantations. Our debates orbit identities forged in a different age, even as the ground beneath us shifts. The tech industry preaches disruption, yet everything feels stagnant. New words – woke, trans, cancel culture – jar against this backdrop, offering crude clarity where grand ideologies fail. We need fresh thought, but language is policed, and dissent is silenced. Can we break free from the weight of dead ideas but still learn from the past? Join us for a weekend where we explore the ideological ruins of the past and ask what comes next.