ABSTRACT
In March 2012, a serious conflict arose between the Dutch government and its higher advisory body, the Council of State. The government proposed to change the law on citizenship, claiming that immigrants should lose their citizenship of origin if they wanted to acquire Dutch citizenship. Dutch Minister of Home Affairs, Liesbeth Spies, argued that limiting people to one nationality would clarify ‘the rights and obligations between the state and the individual’ (DutchNews.nl 2012b). More openly, a conservative minister had argued a few years earlier that dual citizenship represented the threat of ‘loyalty to two countries’ (DutchNews.nl 2010). In reply, the Council of State argued that people with more than one nationality are not necessarily less integrated. On the contrary, dual nationality had thus far been considered a way to integrate foreigners: ‘nationality and loyalty are not automatically the same thing’ (DutchNews.nl 2012a).
