Book Review Symposium Introduction picture to show how constitutions implicitly establish subtle but powerful links between our conceptions of peoplehood, statehood and democracy. She shows that while ‘constitutional citizenship’ — which she defines as ‘those aspects of the membership relation that go the very heart of a polity and some of the conditions for its existence’ 7 — might remain an abstract notion; ‘the constitutional citizen is a central figure for understanding the many dimensions of and tensions within modern citizenship as well as for understanding modern constitution-based polities’. 8 Shaw resists the temptation to lay out her own normative idea of what citizenship ought to encompass and how it should be dealt with by constitutions, about who ought to belong and who ought not, or about who should determine the answers to questions such as these. 9 Instead, she provides readers with an analytical framework for reflecting how national citizenship remains a ‘remarkably resilient’ 10 tool for states to define the ‘people in question’. The People in Question also forces us to decipher the Rorschach test of peoplehood, to recognise non-citizenship and statelessness as ‘citizenship’s constant shadow’, which remains outside the picture of constitutional citizenship, though omnipresent. Shaw shows how closely constitutional citizenship is linked to the principles of dignity and equality and how it is often used to limit the scope of these principle. She rightly criticises that citizenship studies have often had an overtly Western focus, failing to account for the colonial and post-colonial legacies of constitutional citizenship and nonwestern approaches to peoplehood and belonging. And finally, she cautions us not to rely naively on classical and doctrinal legal approaches or the promise of a human right to citizenship, and reminds us that equal access to citizenship ‘must be struggled for at specific times and in specific places’. 11 The complexity and the different facets of The People in Question is reflected in the four different contributions to this Symposium. Each of the authors looks at the question of constitutional citizenship from a different perspective and disciplinary background. Johanna Hase opens the discussion by highlighting how the figure of the constitutional citizen contributes to narratives of peoplehood. She reconstructs Shaw’s narrative of constitutional citizenship and shows that the book refrains from familiar plots, simple lessons and easy answers in favour of a more nuanced story. She then examines how Shaw’s notion of constitutional citizenship can be used to analyse the relationship between constitutional discourse and constitutional citizenship, as well as its limits. Regarding the examples of the Basic Law Israel — The Nation-State of the Jewish People and the German debate about the reflection of diversity and/or cultural identity in the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Hase shows how debates around the imaginary constitutional citizen not only transform the narrative of peoplehood, but have ‘implications for the meaning of membership in a [people] without directly 7 8 9 10 11 ibid 57. ibid 44. ibid 254. ibid 55. ibid 30. 369