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In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union (EU). According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilizing force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The chapter focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain's postcolonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbors. In successfully racializing, lumping together, and relabeling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious recasting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the postnational principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multinational, cosmopolitan, or human rights–based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. This chapter unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multiethnic societies.

This chapter examines recent citizenship policy change in Europe in order to address two important questions. First, are immigrant-receiving states undergoing a “restrictive turn,” making citizenship less accessible to foreigners? Our analysis finds that while certain restrictive developments have certainly occurred, a broader comparative perspective shows that these hardly amount to a larger restrictive trend. Second, regardless of what the restrictive changes amount to, what explains why certain countries have added more onerous requirements for citizenship? In answering this question, we focus on the politics of citizenship. We argue that once citizenship becomes politicized – thus mobilizing the latent anti-immigrant sentiments of the population – the result will likely be either the blocking of liberalizing pressures or the imposition of new restrictive measures. We support this argument by focusing on three countries: a case of genuine restrictiveness (Germany), another where the anti-immigrant rhetoric's bark has been more noticeable than the citizenship policy's bite (the United Kingdom), and one where proposed policy change in the restrictive direction does not add up to a restrictive policy overall, but rather a normalization with other liberal citizenship regimes in Europe (Belgium). We argue that politics accounts for why states adopt restrictive policies, and we conclude that it is premature and inaccurate to suggest that policies of exclusion are converging across Europe.