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In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has created a common status called “European citizenship”. Yet, to date, the EU has no common citizenship policy; each Member State remains sovereign to determine “who” a European citizen is and the law relating to the access and loss of European citizenship is wholly fragmented between national legal systems. This research project aims to focus on the challenges and opportunities that this situation generates.

The infamously capricious Roman tyrant Nero was said to post his edicts high on the columns of Rome so that his subjects would find them difficult to read and were thus more likely to violate them. What we can learn from this anecdote is that uncertainty about the law’s content promotes non-compliance, and that the rule of law requires that legal rules display certain features, such as publicness, clarity, non-retroactivity, etc. These features enable the law to discharge one of its core objectives, namely to stabilize actors’ normative expectations in an otherwise rather volatile world. To be sure, one way of achieving this is to commit government to fundamental primary rules of behavior; yet commitment to primary norms alone does not suffice for upholding the rule of law.

With close to 250 million international migrants, and almost 65 million refugees and displaced people, the topic of newcomer integration has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. Private individuals and organizations in the receiving countries have helped refugees in different ways, yet their actions have often been considered goodwill — voluntarism, charity, and philanthropic initiatives — rather than an individual responsibility. What should be the role of individuals in newcomer integration? Is there an individual responsibility and what could it demand from individual agents?

The project ‘Supporting the expansion and further development of the quality of childcare and all-day care for primary school children, as well as other measures in the field of child and youth policy’ supports the political and legal measures of the Federal Ministry for Education, Family, Seniors, Women and Youth (BMBFSFJ) during the current legislative period, together with its cooperation partners Prognos AG and fischerAppelt. The project focuses on the needs-based expansion and quality development of daycare services, the introduction of a legal entitlement to full-day care for primary school children, as well as the recruitment and retention of educational professionals.