Samenvatting

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.