Much ado about not-very-much? Assessing ten years of German citizenship reform

This article examines the development and impact of German citizenship policy over the past decade. As its point of departure, it takes the 2000 Citizenship Law, which sought to undertake a full-scale reform and liberalisation of access to German membership. The article discusses this law’s content and subsequent amendments, focusing particularly on its quantitative impact, asking why the number of naturalisations has been lower than originally expected. The article outlines current challenges to the law’s structure operation and identifies potential trajectories for its future development

Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

This article examines the global dynamics of late colonialism and how these informed South African apartheid. More specifically, it locates the programmes of mass relocation and bantustan ‘self-government’ that characterised apartheid after 1959 in relation to three key dimensions. Firstly, the article explores the global circulation of idioms of ‘development’ and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan ‘selfgovernment’ in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and, thirdly, it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler politics and the Cold War. It argues that, far from developing policies that were at odds with the global ‘wind of change’, South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy

The 'local turn' in historical perspective: two city case studies in Britain & Germany

This article addresses the ‘local turn’ of migration and integration policies in historical perspective in Newcastle upon Tyne and Bremen. It draws upon a wide range of government documentation and offers a comparative assessment of both cities’ policies from the 1960s onwards. It discusses the vertical dimension of policymaking though an exploration of the local governance of migrant integration in relation to the national level. Although Britain and Germany's post-war immigration histories and political structures have often been perceived as contrasting, this article reveals a convergence in these cities’ governments’ approaches to their own local diverse societies. These case studies question the long-term impact of overarching national constitutional structures on city-level migration policies. Findings are framed within the local governance and multi-level governance MLG debates. Points for practitioners - European cities are increasingly being recognized for the role they play in devising and implementing their own migration and integration policies. Yet very little is known about the relationship between this ‘local turn’ and multi-level governance (MLG). Practitioners can learn more about cities’ policymaking processes and the extent to which these have been influenced by national agendas, as well as about how research of a historical and cross-country and cross-city nature can inform the on-going policy debate