Ideas of Integration in Citizenship Laws and Citizenship Acquisition Procedures in Belgium and the UK

Abstract

The sociological study of formal citizenship has been strongly shaped by Brubaker’s (1992) analysis of citizenship legislation in France and Germany. Brubaker’s intuition was that citizenship laws express the conceptions of membership hold by governments and administrations, if not the society at large (although the author dissociated himself from the simplifications that subdivided nations in “ethnic” and “civic” – Brubaker, 1999).