To Belong Or Not To Belong 137 That would suggest that it is natural and hence normal for man to belong to groups. It also suggests that law is very likely to reflect man’s social nature. It finally suggests that those to whom this does not apply form a miserable and unnatural exception. The a-historicity of human nature, claimed by Aristotle, would then mean that ‘statelessness’ is problematic throughout human history. However, one is not led to believe that this is the case. Human history, also in relation to people’s political and legal status, is abound with change, and thus renders writing an historical introduction to a volume on statelessness an enduring challenge. Both as a concept and as an actual problem to real people, statelessness presupposes the state and the nation-state’s connection between state and collective identity. It also presupposes the overpowering significance of the dichotomy citizen/non-citizen that carries Laura van Waas’ statement that ‘nationality matters.’2 The process of going back into time, looking for people that were not citizens of the state they resided in, or of any other one, and then analysing their situation, soon comes to a halt because statelessness presupposes a political and legal framework that was not yet in place in most periods of time. There was a time that simply everyone was stateless stricto senso, purely because there were no states as we conceive them. Some might even argue that this was the case up until the 19th century.3 Since time immemorial, the political and legal status of people has nonetheless been crucial to the political and civil rights they have, and can exercise, to their role in public affairs, to their legal standing, to access to courts and to determine what law applies to them. Public authorities - especially those of polity types that define politics in terms of a community of people instead of using territorial terms or from the perspective of a ruler or divinity4 - tend to differentiate between people on the basis of their collective identity, resulting in a different treatment of ‘foreigners.’5 This is not reserved to the nation-state. However, the distinction between aliens holding citizenship of another state and stateless aliens is a modern one, as these categories, with their current meanings, were formulated against the backdrop of the modern state, the modern conception of the world as divided into states and the global expansion of the state. Its strong focus on the state disregards internal social differentiation as 2 Laura van Waas, Nationality Matters. Statelessness under International Law (Antwerp 2008). 3 E.g. Andreas Osiander, Before the State. Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford 2007). 4 For a typology of polities, see Samuel Finer, The History of Government. vol. I Ancient Monarchies and Empires (Oxford UP 1999) 1-4 and 34-58. 5 ‘Foreigner’ is used here in the very general meaning of anyone who does not belong to the relevant community and/or is considered to be an outsider. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 136-152