In this article the recent transformations of citizenship in the Netherlands are analysed in relation to a developing form of governmentality. We regard citizenship as a state regulated technique of in- and exclusion and a crucial instrument in the management of populations. Taking the Dutch contexts of immigration and integration as our case, we argue that cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism appear in a double helix: they combine to form a new governmental strategy we call neo-liberal communitarianism. Neo-liberal communitarianism is the underlying rationale of a population management that operates both in an individualizing (citizenship as individual participation and responsibility) and a de-individualizing way ('community' at various aggregate and localized levels as frame of 'integration'). It thus combines a communitarian care of a Dutch culturally grounded national community - conceived as traditionally'enlightened' and 'liberal'- with a neo-liberal emphasis on the individual's responsibility to achieve membership of that community. 'Community' is thereby selectively seen as mobilized and present (when immigrant integration is concerned) or as latently present and still in need of mobilization (when indigenous Dutch are concerned). Concomitantly, a repressive responsibilization and a facilitative responsibilization are aimed at these two governmentally differentiated populations.

As Western European nation-states adapt to the challenges posed to the nation-state by globalization and immigration, adjusting citizenship criteria for immigrants has been one of the responses to these developments. This article compares the current changes in citizenship policies of three Western European states: the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. The main concern of the article is to shed light on the emerging development of a form of neoliberal communitarian citizenship that involves an increased emphasis on the need to earn one’s citizenship. While many have signalled a shift towards neoliberal citizenship, this study assesses to what extent such a shift is characterized by a contractual view that sees citizenship no longer primarily as a prima facie right but as a prized possession that is to be earned and can be lost if not properly cultivated. At the same time, the study analyses the content of citizenship criteria to see how the nation-state in these three countries is sacralized by an emphasis on the national community. These two trends of earned citizenship are conceptualized in the study as neoliberal communitarianism.

This article discusses the emergence, in the field of crime and safety, of a formula of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. This is a paradoxical governmental strategy that combines a focus on ‘individual responsibility’, ‘community’ and a ‘selectively tough state’. The discussion is based on the Foucaultian triangle of strategy, political programmes and techniques. The substance of this application consists of a discussion of recent Dutch political programmes and techniques in crime and safety policies. The discussion includes the local case of Rotterdam, a city at times regarded as a ‘policy laboratory’. Specifically, the role that notions of citizenship and community play in crime and safety policies is analysed. We hereby point at two different manifestations of responsibilization – repressive responsibilization and facilitative responsibilization – aimed at two governmentally differentiated populations. In addition, we describe how neoliberal communitarianism entails the selective exclusion of subjects imagined as ‘high risk’. Because the government of crime tells us much about the government of ‘society’, neoliberal communitarianism is a useful concept to grasp contemporary changes in government in the Netherlands and in other European countries.

This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the 'penal welfarism' it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of a paradoxical set of doctrines, discourses and techniques. This involves an emphasis on both 'individual responsibility' and 'community', protecting market and community by tightening social control, law and order and the production of rational self-controlling individuals while excluding the cultural and biological 'risk citizen'. The article illustrates the incorporation of criminological theories as policy underpinnings, and it explicates how criminological theories can be placed in the discursive space of neoliberal communitarianism.

For some time now, Rotterdam has actively portrayed itself as a policy laboratory. This laboratorial rhetoric, as one could call it, has prevailed in the fields of housing, urban problems and welfare provision, and most recently it has also emerged in the context of Rotterdam as a 'smart city'. The latter is nothing special, as technological applications to urban problems are full of 'urban labs', of experimentation and of what Halpern et al. (2013) have called 'test-bed urbanism'. However, in the context of urban and social policies in a very general sense, it is less common today. To understand the development of governing diversity in Rotterdam, it is pertinent to scrutinize the character and historical roots of Rotterdam's laboratorial logic. The consideration of the city as a laboratory goes back to the Chicago School, many of whose foremost sociologists considered Chicago a laboratory. While they productively wavered between regarding the city as a field site (in which reality was found) and a laboratory (in which reality was made) (Gieryn 2006), the use of a laboratorial rhetoric by policy makers and politicians is of another kind. It is first and foremost a governing rhetoric, which explicitly assumes that urban reality can be made because it is found to be in a certain, more often than not deplorable, state. In Rotterdam, the laboratorial rhetoric has been associated with the 'innovative' character of policies regarding crime, urban segregation and poverty (Noordegraaf 2008). In no small measure, the 'innovative' nature of, for instance, combinations of care and control in social policies have been applauded by scientists (Notten 2008; Tops 2011).