This chapter opens with Bonnie Honig's discussion of how attitudes towards ‘the foreigner’ contain both welcome and celebration (xenophilia) and fear and hatred (xenophobia). I illustrate my argument for a contemporary tilt towards xenophobia by reviewing the shift in the English policy landscape from multiculturalism to cohesion, along with the growth of anti-extremist policies. I then locate the requirement to promote FBV within this increasingly illiberal landscape.

The nation and the ‘other’: belonging in 21st-century Britain

The American political philosopher Bonnie Honig argues that ‘solving’ ‘the problems of foreignness’ underlies contemporary discussions of democracy and citizenship (2001: 1), and that attitudes towards ‘the foreigner’ are shot through with ambivalence. The foreigner is both a potential threat and a potential saviour. Honig uses examples from US literature and film to make her case, but I give an example here from Shakespeare (as studying his work was sometimes offered as evidence of promoting FBV: see Chapter Four). Fortinbras, prince of Norway, in Hamlet, appears in the final moment of the play on a stage filled with the dead bodies of the play's protagonists, to stabilise the collapsing state of Denmark. Most immigrants do not become the ruler of their new nation, of course, but Honig argues that the ‘good’ immigrant on a trajectory to citizenship will make the kind of explicit connection and commitment to the state (through citizenship ceremonies, for example) that the native-born population do not, thus further legitimising and energising the consent basis of the state. However, the shadow of the ‘bad’ immigrant – an illegal alien – remains potent. Since Honig was writing, the ‘haphazard’ balance (Kofman, 2005: 461) between xenophobia and xenophilia – which Honig understood as a ‘co- presence’ (2001: 97) – has surely shifted towards xenophobia in both the UK and the US. The illegality of the alien and their illegitimate consumption of a nation-state's resources is now sketched in lurid tabloid colours as migration from both Eastern Europe and poor and war-torn parts of Africa and the Middle East has continued.