The Moralisation of Citizenship in Dutch Integration Discourse

In this essay two arguments are made about the Dutch integration policy discourse drawing on a distinction between formal citizenship and moral citizenship. First it is argued that citizenship is increasingly framed as moral citizenship and subsequently that this entails a shift from actual citizenship to a virtual conception of it. This virtualisation of citizenship leads to the discursive articulation of certain citizens - immigrants who are citizens in the formal sense - as quasi-subjects, at once protected and feared within the nation-state. This entails that the virtualisation of citizenship does not concern formal inclusion in the nation-state, but rather the moral inclusion in the discursive domain of ‘society’.