13 Mar Trying to Buck Up British Citizenship: Lord Goldsmith Reports
As one of his lead initiatives as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown charged former British attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith (he of Iraq War justification fame) with undertaking a study of British citizenship. The 134-page report was issued earlier this week (pdf here).
Let’s just say the early reviews have not been favorable. Two recommendations have been singled out for ridicule: that all 18 year old native-born British citizens take an oath of allegiance to the Queen similar to that administered naturalizing citizens, and that Britain establish a national day on the order of July 4th.
The report looks like a rich resource for anyone interested in the conception and practice of citizenship, so I’m going to withhold judgment for the moment. But to the extent that it is premised on a governmental capacity to reverse the dissipation of national identity, count me as a skeptic. As an editorial in the Guardian puts it:
All nationalities are manufactured. When forged in the heat of war or revolution they may not seem to be so. For his own reasons, the prime minister asked Lord Goldsmith to strengthen British identity at an arbitrary moment. There was always the risk that the ideas he produced would have all the authenticity of ersatz coffee. Many of his proposals contain sense, but the suggestion of a royalist oath for 18-year-olds shows the danger of trying to impose identity: creating disunity rather than reducing it. A sense of belonging cannot be achieved merely by mouthing humbug.
It’s hard to imagine a comparable discussion about citizenship happening here in the U.S., where we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve transcended petty nationalism.