For years, Andre Geim was known to the world as a Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist, which suited both him and the Dutch just fine. He is still a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but now, according to the government of the Netherlands, he is no longer Dutch.
He is, he said in a show of considerable understatement, “extremely annoyed.”
Thirteen years ago, Mr. Geim took British citizenship to accept a knighthood, and until recently he had no inkling that it would cause a problem. He said he was informed that he was no longer a Dutch citizen and must hand his passport over at the embassy in London or face consequences from Interpol, because the Netherlands sharply restricts dual citizenship.
“Personally, I consider myself a Dutch-British Nobel Prize winner (in this order),” he said in an email. “The history and my time living and working in the Netherlands are very close to my heart.”
The decision to revoke his citizenship, he added, “is just so sad and odd.”
Mr. Geim was born in 1958 in Russia to parents of German descent. He adopted Dutch citizenship in the 1990s while at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, working on what would prove to be groundbreaking physics.
In 2010, he and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov — who were by then working in England — won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their experiments creating graphene, the world’s thinnest and strongest material.
His list of honors goes on and on, and Mr. Geim has the unique distinction of having been awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel, a satirical honor for strange scientific achievements (in his case, levitating a frog) that seem laughable but prompt thought.
Dutch authorities were happy to claim him as Dutch. The Netherlands knighted him for his contributions to science, an honor that is officially described as “rare, being given for example to Dutch Nobel Prize laureates.” He was made a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“My bronze bust is somewhere in Den Haag to show off,” he said, referring to The Hague.
Mr. Geim moved to Britain in 2001 to work at the University of Manchester, where he remains today. His trouble began after he was offered a British knighthood, though he would not discover it until more than a dozen years later.
A non-Briton can receive a British knighthood, but only a British citizen is entitled to use the accompanying title, Sir or Dame. So he obtained citizenship.
“I took it to get the U.K. knighthood and to be called officially ‘Sir Andre,’ prestigious in the U.K.,” he said. “I took it only to receive the British knighthood.”
But by adopting British citizenship, he ran afoul of rules in the Netherlands, which seeks to limit dual nationalities. Voluntarily acquiring another citizenship can set off an automatic loss of Dutch citizenship.
The Dutch citizenship rules are not new, and there is a movement to loosen them. Within the European Union, multiple citizenship is fairly common, but people can also move freely from one country to another, living and working in a new home without needing a new legal status. Britain officially left the union in 2020.
In retrospect, Mr. Geim says, he might have made a different choice. “I would probably decline this knighthood if I knew the consequences for my Dutch nationality, but that was before Brexit and no one informed me about the consequences at that time.”
Though he says he got no practical benefit from his Dutch nationality, and did not expect to do so in the future, Mr. Geim has long seen himself as European above all else.
In an essay he wrote when he received the Nobel Prize, the physicist described growing up in Russia and experiencing discrimination in his education because of his family’s German roots, concluding that, after moving to the West in 1990, his life and work improved.
“I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary,” he wrote.
His loss is far from being the most severe at a time when migrants face increasing pressure around the world, risking — and sometimes losing — their lives to reach new shores and borders, or having rights like birthright citizenship in the United States challenged.
But his struggle with the Dutch authorities does hint at the complications immigrants face everywhere in contending with conflicting and opaque requirements, politics and unforeseeable consequences. And his difficulties show that no one is exempt from bureaucracy.
Mr. Geim — Sir Andre — says he has “spent thousands” in legal fees trying to convince Dutch authorities to let him keep his citizenship, including by citing an exception to the rule if it is in “the interest of the Dutch state,” to no avail.
Nobel or not, he said, “I was kicked out of the country as a useless thing.”
Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.
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