Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

The Curious Case of the Vanishing Debate over Irish Home Rule: The Dominion of Canada,Irish Home Rule,and Canadian Historiography

In the 1880s, the British Empire was abuzz with debate over the Irish Home Rule Bills being discussed at that time in the Westminster Parliament. The Dominion of Canada was no exception and the Canadian House of Commons held no fewer than three debates on the concept of Irish Home Rule. Studying these debates provides a way to explore British identity beyond the British Isles. Although the nineteenth century attempts to implement Irish Home Rule were ultimately a failure, for almost half a century the concept was discussed throughout the Empire. This article takes an in-depth look at the Canadian parliamentary response to Irish Home Rule. In doing so, it argues that the debates reveal much about British identity in the Dominion, at least at the parliamentary level, and sheds light on conceptions of Britishness in the wider British world. It also suggests that these imperial debates represent an important stage in the development of Canadian history and deserve to take their place in Canadian historiography.     

Being Canadian: Dual Citizenship in Historical Perspective

Why do states configure their citizenship laws in certain ways? Why do they allow or prohibit dual citizenship? Why was it only in 1946 that Canada decided to enact its first citizenship law which prohibited multiple national allegiances? Why was a similar proposal abandoned in 1931? And why was this citizenship law changed in 1977 to allow dual citizenship? A common answer is that citizenship reflects the national “identity” of each nation-state. Through a perusal of the debates regarding citizenship laws in Canada, I locate the particular motivation for introducing those laws. I argue that although the symbolic element of citizenship laws is significant, citizenship laws are enacted as a political instrument to achieve immediate and specific goals. In particular, accepting dual citizenship in Canada should be seen as a one of the strategies political elites tried in order to incorporate English and French speakers under the same flag.     

A community out of balance: nationality law and migration politics in the history of post-unification Italy

Italian government policies concerning foreign immigration have to be understood in the context of laws on nationality. Since the time of unification, Italian laws on nationality have been closely determined by policies on emigration and immigration. As a result, the laws regarding the nationality status of Italian emigrants returning from abroad, and for foreign immigrants in Italy, have on the whole been determined by the procedures adopted for the acquisition or deprivation of Italian nationality. This is a subject that has not been studied and this article reconstructs the principal stages in the development of Italian nationality laws from the early twentieth century to the present. This reveals that Italian nationality law treats Italian emigrants and foreign immigrants in very different ways. Both the legal system and government policy has in the past been extremely generous towards the former and has made both the preservation and the reacquisition of nationality relatively easy for Italian nationals, even before there were practical motives for this (e.g. the right for Italians living overseas to vote). When it comes to foreign immigrants, however, Italian law is amongst the most restrictive in western Europe. The article concludes by arguing that this underlying imbalance is a major but largely ignored weakness in Italian democracy.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

BEFORE THE DELUGE: CANADIANS ON FOREIGN OWNERSHIP, 1920–1955

More Americans now reside in Canada than at any time since the Vietnam War. This article documents and analyzes the migration, settlement, and identity of US-born residents in three Canadian cities. My work helps fill the gap in the scholarly literature on issues related to international migration at the Canadian–US borderlands. The article's overarching goal is to illustrate that transnationality, as exhibited by US immigrants in Canada, is far more complex than prior studies of transnational identity have indicated. Findings from this study indicate that transnational linkages and identities are geographically and temporally contingent and are, as such, a reflection of both time and place. My comparison of the shifting identities of American migrants who reside in three different metropolitan areas in Canada allows a more critical analysis of the ever-shifting terrain of transnational identities as they are expressed in different contexts. Data analyzed for this study were compiled from the Canadian census for the years 1961 through 2006, survey questionnaires, unstructured and structured interviews, and on-site field work.     

‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide

The end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial records worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to Britain to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually code-named ‘Operation Legacy’, by reading the ‘migrated archives’ that have been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. It asks where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the Colonial Office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but, rather, significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial governments overseas in response to each local context. The general idea was to save Britain’s honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitations in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from putting sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions. The episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonisation is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels, in the colonial administrations on the ground.     

Nation and reproduction: immigrants and their children in population discourse in Italy

Italian society is undergoing significant demographic changes: on one hand, the widespread decrease in birth rates and extended life expectancies lead to a substantial aging of the population; on the other hand, rising immigration rates constitute an important factor behind the renewal and growth of young population segments. According to conventional disciplinary divisions, such changes are the established domain of demography; however, it mainly draws on ethno‐national categories to investigate them. In reference to the Italian context, this article specifically highlights the way national demography employs forecasts and value judgments derived from a qualitative and selective definition of population to address the marked increase in children born to foreign parents. By examining the reproductive behaviours of migrants in Italy, the article thus offers a wide‐ranging reflection on the social boundaries that shape the formation of an ‘other’ generation.     

Discourses of nation among migrants from Northern Ireland: Irishness,Britishness and the spaces in‐between

Narratives of nation and identity are highly contested in Northern Ireland, with allegiance usually given to an Irish nation or a British nation, or located somewhere along a continuum between the two. The negotiation of one's identity along this continuum can become particularly complex once one migrates outside Northern Ireland. Adopting a sense of belonging to or exclusion from an Irish diasporic community is part of this process of negotiation. This paper explores these negotiations of identity among both Catholic and Protestant migrants from Northern Ireland to England. It utilises an oral history archive of interviews with individuals who migrated in the latter half of the 20th century, and focuses on narratives of nation and identity among these migrants. Drawing on the notion of England as a diaspora space, in order to make sense of these narratives, the intersections between diasporic Irishness and different British identities are untangled in an attempt to draw out the spaces ‘in‐between’ two, often polarised, narratives of nation.     

‘Britishness’, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s

This article considers understandings of ‘Britishness’ in the Natal colony in the 1870s. Focusing on St Helenian children’s expulsion from ‘government’ schools that were ostensibly open to all racial groups, the article shows how competing definitions of race and ‘Britishness’ shaped the responses of colonial officials, settlers and the St Helenian community to the expulsion. The white settler population in Natal was concerned about St Helenian economic migrants’ inclusion in white, English society. In particular, the ambiguous racial status of St Helenians was seen as potentially harmful to white children. The focus on a group of recent incomers to the colony uncovers a process of racialisation unfolding in the context of migrations within the British Empire. The case highlights how movement and migration within the empire could bring these definitions of race and Britishness into conversation and conflict with each other.     

Selling the Empire?: Marketing and the Demise of the British World,c.1920–1960

ABSTRACT

This article uses a study of the politics of marketing and advertising to consider the role that British World collaboration played in consumer politics in the UK and the Dominions between the 1920s and 1950s. We will assess how politicians and businesspeople in the Dominions responded to the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts to encourage the habit of ‘Buying British’ in the inter-war years, as well as exploring the activities of the leading American marketing agency, J. Walter Thompson. The article concludes with a discussion of how the politics of patriotic trade was recast in the 1950s. While this was a cause which had taken on different forms in Australia, Canada and South Africa during the 1930s, in each country its advocates shared a wider concern with imperial development. And yet, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, cut across efforts to promote the consumer habit of buying imperially. By the early 1960s patriotic trade campaigns in the ‘old’ Dominions were nationally focused and shorn of their earlier ‘Britannic’ identity.     

Immigration Reform in Canada and the United States: How Dramatic,How Different?

In contrast to recent policies in the United States, immigration reform in Canada, during the past decade, has resulted in one of the most transformative periods in Canada’s immigration history. This article examines these changes, against the comparative backdrop of American inaction. These include changes affecting the three classes of legal permanent residents—economic, family, and refugee—as well as temporary foreign workers and foreign students. Canadian citizenship rules have also been refocused from citizenship as a “right” to citizenship as a “responsibility.” The article illustrates the advantages of the Canadian system, but cautions against overmanagement, centralization of decision-making power, and the loss of Canada’s welcoming reputation. The Canadian system, while not perfect, is efficient and should be able to successfully adjust to future problems that arise, provided that the Canadian public has sufficient input in policy decisions. Given a more complex and cumbersome US immigration policy system, comprehensive immigration reform is not likely to occur if partisanship prevails.