Report on Citizenship Law: Germany spouses as well as non-German descendants50 intending to acquire German nationality based upon the special provisions of the Expellees Act and the Basic Law. As a result, the number of repatriated Germans entitled to German nationality went down substantially. In 2006 only 7,626 persons from the former Soviet Union moved to Germany as compared to 35,369 in 2005. Only one application out of eight has been successful as compared to two out of three in the years before the entry into force of the Immigration Act 2004.51 In 2006/2007 the political debate on the increased recognition of dual nationality in Germany nationality law, and the facilitation of naturalisation of foreigners recruited by postwar agreements on Gastarbeiter and their descendants to the second and third generation, was revived in the context of a general debate on the success or failure of integration efforts. Particularly troublesome was the question of the extent to which sufficient knowledge of the German language and basics of the German constitutional order and political system should be required in order to become a German national. A highly controversial debate arose about various proposals by the Länder to introduce naturalisation tests requiring proof of sufficient knowledge of the German politics, history and culture as well as administrative guidelines for naturalisation authorities in Baden-Württemberg to examine doubts as to the constitutional loyalty of applicants for naturalisation (for a critical discussion see Hanschmann 2008). The different practices in the Länder concerning the necessary standard of knowledge of the German language in reading and writing became a matter of intensive public debate regarding the relevance of insufficient knowledge of the German language as a reason for the economic failure of substantial parts of the juvenile foreign population in the labour market. The decision of the Federal Administrative Court of 20 October 200552 partially dispensing with a requirement of knowledge of the written German language was one of the reasons for a legislative amendment in 2007. Another was an ongoing controversy within the jurisprudence on the question of withdrawal of naturalisation. The Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling of 24 May 200653 upheld the existing administrative practice of withdrawing naturalisation on the basis of general rules of the Administrative Procedure Act; with regard to the legal effect of such withdrawals for spouses and descendants, the Court requested the legislator to provide for rules taking into account the different public and private interests at stake. Political analysis Although there was a basic consensus among the major political parties that the integration of the foreign population, recruited in the 1960s as migrant workers, and their descendants, had been neglected to a substantial degree in the following decades, no agreement could be reached on the role of naturalisation and the acquisition of German nationality in the process of integration. While the ruling Social Democratic Party in 1999 considered the acquisition of German nationality to be an essential instrument in achieving integration, the opposition Christian Democratic Parties (CDU/CSU) argued that naturalisation should complete the process of integration rather than pave the way towards it. The disagreement focussed upon the issue of dual nationality. While the Social Democratic Party and its coalition partner, Bündnis ’90/Die Grünen, with the assistance of the Liberal Party, advocated a concept of toleration of dual nationality based upon a dual attachment to different nations and dual 50 The status ‘ethnic German’ according to Art. 116 of the Basic Law is not transferred to descendants. Immigration Report for 2006, 1st ed. December 2007 at p. 50 ff. 52 BVerwGE 124, 268, 273. 53 2 BvR 669/04, www.bverfG.de. 51 22 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/5- © 2020 Author(s)