Calling for the Super Citizen: Citizenship ceremonies in the UK and Germany as techniques of subject-formation

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 categorisation 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.