This practice can be explained either as a ceremonial imposition of incidental penalties, carried out in a purely mechanical way, or as an expression of the will to shield the State against “dangerous aliens”. In this latter sense, by depriving them even of rights that they have never obtained, the authorities triumphantly ban them from the social and political ield. This fear of an improbable threat makes all the more clear the fear of something socially reasonable and legally probable: that the children of immigrants might acquire Greek citizenship. Shortly ater the reformed Greek Citizenship Code was instituted (Law 3838/2010),77 an Athens attorney (the same person who had joined other members of Golden Dawn in the aforementioned complaint that led to Savvas Michail’s criminal prosecution) iled before the Council of State asking the revocation of various provisions of the law. The Fourth Chamber of the Council of State, found the application admissible in its Decision No. 350/2011 and sent the case to the Plenary Session to judge the constitutionality of these provisions. The distinctive features of the Fourth Chamber’s decision regarding Law 3838/2010 are the following: a) the nation is conceived as a self-contained legal fact, separate from the people and materialized through the Constitution; b) the law of blood is elevated to the status of a Constitutional principle; c) because of the above, only an individual judgment on the “consciousness” of the person requesting Greek citizenship may give them a position among the Greek people, as long as the interested person’s parents have lived more than ive years in Greece and the interested person has completed six years attendance in a Greek school; d) inally, since public authority is at stake in local elections, the franchise is limited to Greek citizens. The distinction between the notions of people and nation on which the decision is based is not entirely new in Greek constitutional law, as it had been tested theoretically by the constitutional jurists of the Metaxas regime, who had to conclude by any means necessary that all authority in Greece emanates not from the people, but from the nation – and thus that national will may contradict popular will. This view is contrary to the democratic view of political community, instead favouring the metaphysical idea of nation over the political one. The law of blood, namely the acquisition of children’s citizenship through their parents, is an institution of the Greek legal order, as well as of virtually every legal order in the world. However, it is legally unprecedented to invest the “law of blood” with the status of a constitutional principle and claim that its violation leads to the “degeneration of the nation”. The issue of citizenship essentially poses the question, “Who are we, the people?”. A powerful fraction of the judiciary answered this question on the basis of exclusion, not inclusion; in terms of fear and introversion. This fraction practically did 77. 62 | This law introduced for the irst time the possibility to acquire Greek citizenship not only through the law of blood, but also through the law of the soil. It fueled tremendous political reactions, which sometimes reached beyond hysteria and irrationality, and plunged an entire society into a collective yackety-yak about national purity, unfailing continuity through history and racialism. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG