EU Citizens in the UK and Britons Abroad: Defensive Naturalizations and Institutional Barriers

Following the Brexit Referendum, EU citizens in the UK and Britons in the Continent risk a drastic loss of rights and security, and defensive naturalisation – obtaining respectively UK nationality or the nationality of an EU member state – is becoming an increasingly diffused strategy. For this paper I propose to show how the institutional and street-level bureaucracy context of naturalisation processes can pose barriers to this strategy, introducing further uncertainties while the exact terms of Brexit are negotiated. The data here used derive from a qualitative research on the implementation of nationality legislation in Belgium and the UK, for which I have interviewed different kinds of institutions (Nationality Checking Services and the Nationality team of UK Visas and Integration in the UK, municipal registers and magistrates deciding on nationality application in Belgium). EU citizens in the UK, exactly because they have benefited from easier entry and permanence conditions, dealt until recently with a nationality procedure that was more cumbersome that those required from the non-EU citizens. This was one of the reasons for the introduction of the permanent residence requirement for naturalisation for EU citizens, a decision that in turn left them further vulnerable to potential denials. In Belgium, an extreme situation has arisen for the British personnel of the EU. Having been in Belgium on safe diplomatic documents, they are now discovering that periods on such documents are not counted towards the residence requirement for Belgian nationality, and that they might never be able to obtain nationality.