This editorial offers an introduction to the current issue.

This article analyzes the relation between law and citizenship on the basis of five modalities. This analysis is premised on the observation that citizenship plays a central role in the contemporary debate about the development of political communities. Furthermore it is obvious that citizenship is inextricably linked to law, but it is not easy to get a clear and complete picture of this link. This is due to, on the one hand, the versatility of the concept of citizenship, and the versatility of the phenomenon law on the other. In short, the relation between law and citizenship is multifaceted, which the typology of modalities is meant to reveal.

Citizenship is a notoriously complex and an essentially contested concept which has been defined in many different ways. The only stable element in all these definitions seems to be that citizenship is primarily described in terms of the relationship between the political community and the citizen. This article aims to explain why citizenship is such a contested concept by showing that it is embedded in three very different normative traditions: the liberal conception of citizenship as a (legal) status, the republican conception of citizenship as an activity and the communitarian conception of citizenship as identity. Each approach emphasizes an important element of citizenship, but none of the three is comprehensive enough to provide a complete picture of what citizenship implies in contemporary constitutional democracies. At the same time they cannot simply be merged because they come from different normative traditions among themselves at odds with each other.This article starts by illustrating the three conceptions of citizenship on the basis of the underlying theoretical models: liberalism, republicanism and communitarianism. Section 3 discusses two mutual tensions between different conceptions of citizenship: first between the liberal and republican conception and then between the liberal and republican conception on the one hand and the communitarian conception on the other. In Section 4, this conceptual analysis is used to analyze a policy terrain that is explicitly embedded in the idea of citizenship, namely the integration of immigrants through naturalization policy. Section 5 concludes.

In recent discussions on ‘citizenship’, the concept is oddly dealt with as if it would have originated shortly before the French Revolution and would have meaning in a nation state context only. During at least seven centuries before that, however, it had a crucial importance in the development of Western-European cities. Citizenship, being primarily based on an exclusion from the jurisdiction of local rulers (privilege) which then opens opportunities for the inclusion of citizens in systems of self-rule, has been closely connected with law as from the start. In the article a model developed by Sassen (2006) is used to reconstruct the development of ‘citizenship’ with special reference to the transfer of its elements, often with a considerable change of meaning and function, from one into the other of the four social formations to be distinguished. It is argued that an extended perspective, that acknowledges citizenship and law before its usurpation by the nation state, may be relevant to our assessment of recent developments towards ‘transnational’ forms of citizenship.

The citizen, understood in the classical republican sense as the political actor, is on occasion confronted with issues that concern the room for difference in politics. In the Netherlands, for example, the recent entrance of populist citizens in parliament is regarded as a problem by more deliberative citizens. Do populist citizens threaten ordinary politics or do ordinary citizens, on the contrary, restrict the space of politics too much? To prepare future research on this point, in this article three similar historical controversies in Dutch parliament are examined. In these cases citizens struggle with the problem how much room parliament ought to provide for the differences between them. In these cases citizens eventually grant each other the freedom to engage in politics in their own way, unless that way threatens the freedom of parliamentary politics itself. They defend the right to debate the widest range of issues in the sharpest way, for example, but prohibit making insults and endorsing illegal activities. Further research is needed to confirm and specify these still tentative conclusions.

This article discusses some examples of the Dutch integration exam that illustrate how immigrants are expected not just to know about, but to internalize Dutch norms and values. Some of these norms and values involve freedom of speech and sexual equality. But the message conveyed by the test is that native Dutch are allowed to make use of their right to free speech and sexual self expression, while immigrants would do better not to complain, even if they feel annoyed or hurt by native Dutchmen exercising these rights. This does not so much imply that Dutch natives and immigrants are measured by a different yard-stick, but rather that the first are never measured while the latter remain subjected to measurement all the time. Even if they show deviant, inappropriate or immoral behaviour, native citizens self evidently belong to the Dutch nation, while immigrants, however assimilated and appropriate their behaviour, will never be released from the burden to prove that they are indeed full Dutch citizens.

One of the primary functions of law is to ensure that the legal structure governing all social relations is predictable, coherent, consistent and applicable. All these characteristics of law are referred to as legal certainty. In traditional approaches to legal certainty, law is regarded as a hierarchic system of rules characterised by stability, clarity, predictability, uniformity, calculable enforcement, publicity and predictability.¹xWeber 1925, p. 68. Others like Llewellyn have underlined the importance of appellate courts in ensuring legal certainty by filling up gaps in the law.²xLlewellyn 1960. Also see, Stinchcombe 1999. Such traditional approaches to legal certainty were developed within the context of national legal orders, in which rule making, rule enforcement and rule adjudication authority vested within public actors functioning as representatives of the state.

Noten

• 1 Weber 1925, p. 68.

• 2 Llewellyn 1960. Also see, Stinchcombe 1999.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.