Testing the liberal subject: (in)security, responsibility and ‘self-improvement’ in the UK citizenship test

The recent debate over the changes to the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test offers another opportunity to reflect on the testing of would-be citizens in liberal democracies. The citizenship test has often been understood as part of the ‘strengthening’ of national borders: set within a discourse of fears over high levels of migration and the risk to cultural homogeneity. Furthermore, it has been viewed as an illustration of the death of multiculturalism and presented as an illiberal strategy of cultural assimilation. I propose that whilst the notion of ‘testing’ is built out of fears regarding ‘threatening’ difference and ‘community cohesion’, what the UK testing process presents is an explicitly liberal strategy of governing. Drawing on the history of the test, I suggest that it is not purely a mechanism of restriction but that it also relies on strategies of responsibility, empowerment and ‘self-improvement’. The citizenship test, alongside other recent border strategies, may be better understood as representing a fascinating nexus between advanced liberal ideas of governing and concerns regarding (in)security. I argue that studying the test in this way offers up vital questions about how community and political membership continues to be shaped in late modernity.