While there is extensive literature on states and knowledge, there has been little focus on state ignorance: instances where states are identified as lacking knowledge relevant to addressing social problems. We present the first systematic analysis of how states perceive and respond to ignorance, developing a typology of responses (denial, resignation, and elucidation). We test and refine the typology through analyzing state ignorance of unauthorized migration in Germany and the UK, 1990–2006. Public authorities in both countries responded to ignorance through both denial and resignation. However, variations in control infrastructures and bureaucratic cultures meant that “resignation” took distinct forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their “ignorance,” with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, by contrast, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law, and constraints to enforcement. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating social problems over which they have limited control.
Migration and citizenship studies tend to conceive of naturalization and of citizenship ceremonies as highly ambivalent procedures. They simultaneously include and exclude migrants by granting full membership to certain migrants while separating them from national-born and other migrant citizens. Yet, existing studies with their focus on the inclusion/exclusion divide tend to overlook another key dimension of citizenship ceremonies. I argue that citizenship ceremonies should be understood as techniques of subject-formation that aim at the modification and optimization of the self-understanding and behaviour of newly-naturalized citizens by confronting them with specific expectations. Based on a Critical Discourse Analysis of ceremony speeches observed in four locations in the United Kingdom and in Germany, this article demonstrates that local state representatives encourage naturalized citizens to transform themselves to become a political, economic and cultural asset to the nation-state. In other words, ceremony speakers suggest that naturalized citizens adopt a specific kind of subjectivity which I term-in allusion to its overstraining character-the Super Citizen. My analysis shows that, although the speech is the least regulated element in both the British and the German ceremonies, the subjectivity of the Super Citizen crosses regional and national borders as speakers in all four locations engaged in the call for the Super Citizen. This finding not only questions the predominant categorization in the literature of the UK and Germany as representing 'civic' versus 'ethnic' models of citizenship. It also points to the transnational prevalence of neo-liberal and neo-national discourses in which the Super Citizen subjectivity is deeply entangled.
Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare policy. This trend has important implications for European welfare-state trajectories, but accounts of the policy reasoning behind it have diverged. Are policymakers attempting to delimit social citizenship to secure welfare-state legitimacy? Pursuing new, market-oriented welfare-state goals? Symbolically communicating immigration control intentions to voters? Or attempting to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ 83 elite interviews in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking welfare provision and immigration status in Germany, France, and the UK during the 1990s. We find little evidence suggesting welfare-guided policy reasonings. Rather, this policy linkage appears “immigration-guided:” meant to control “unwanted” immigration or resonate symbolically in immigration politics. Differences in exclusions from welfare support for migrants grew from existing national differences in welfare-state design and politicizations of immigration, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared.
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