Introduction

In surveying the changing relationship between society and the individual, and between the state and the citizen, the last three chapters have adopted a thematic approach. The shoe is now placed on the other foot, and we look at the same issue of the interaction between people and their collectivity by examining the fortunes of certain specific groups in Dutch society. As a set of criteria for identifying them the following concepts are employed: class, ideology or Weltanschauung, gender or sexuality, and ethnicity. The latter category will include immigrants, gypsies and Jews, and also take stock briefly of the more significant regional identities, especially that of the Frisians.

The analysis in each section will differ in order to suit the subject matter in hand; there will be no dogmatically consistent set of questions levelled in turn at each group. But the general framework of the enquiry in this part of the book is to do with representation and location within the state. The state was manifested in a number of legal pronouncements about citizenship and the rights of various people living within its borders, and in the views and prejudices of the Dutch elite as it chose to interpret those laws and add its supplementary informal provisions. The changing relationship between on the one hand the state, and on the other the individuals with their shifting allegiances and identities, through the groups that they formed or which were formed for them, is therefore the theme of this chapter.