The Fashioning of the Other in Europe’s Constitutional Repertoires

Out this month from Cambridge University Press, Constitutional Intolerance draws examples from France, the Netherlands, Hungary and Poland to illustrate the author’s key point: vulnerability towards intolerance is inscribed in the structures of the law. 

Minorities in time and space

Dr Marietta van der Tol’s new monograph identifies a common root for the treatment of “others” in European nations: Christian canon law and its approach to non-Christian minorities. The book draws on Van der Tol’s Cambridge PhD thesis (POLIS, 2020), a legal-historical study of religious minorities in early modern Europe and the influence of that era on how modern nation-states approach minorities. That work compared Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Extending the case studies with an exploration of two contemporary illiberal states—Hungary and Poland—Van der Tol’s new book demonstrates a continuum between their handling of “others” and the kinds of (in)tolerance manifest in law and policy around, for example, the banning of full-face veils in the Netherlands and France. 

To quote from the final chapter:

“The political othering of certain identities along with their reduced visibility also engenders experiences of lived incongruity across private and public spaces.  . . . the burden of this incongruity falls on religious, ethnic, and ethnoreligious minorities, and very often specifically on women and girls. The same could be said for sexual minorities, who may experience this in their day-to-day life even in otherwise liberal-leaning states, but for whom their public marginalisation in Poland and Hungary brings daily anxieties to a higher level. These incongruities do not simply pertain to abstract notions of public and private, the secular or the sacred; minorities carry those incongruities in their bodies and in the spaces through which they move. The question is if this burden is truly justifiable from a constitutional perspective.”

Interdisciplinary work

The work is manifestly interdisciplinary, benefitting from Van der Tol’s immersion in constitutional law (the topic of her early studies at Utrecht), political, social and religious history (studied at Masters level in Utrecht and at Yale), as well as international studies. The strands of work on Hungary and Poland were developed during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. 

Van der Tol’s work in this domain has been generously supported by the Alfred Landecker Foundation, whose sponsorship (together with a Leverhulme award) now brings her back to Cambridge to pursue further international and inter-religious studies at the Faculty of Divinity. As the acknowledgements record, the work also received significant support from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Sint Geertruidsleen, and (at its inception) a Fulbright scholarship.

This book will be of wide interest, bringing new insight to early modern studies, constitutional law, and the history of religions. It also serves to call attention to the situation of contemporary minorities, the potency of constitutional intolerance (especially for the pursuit of right-wing aims), and the need to exercise power with care. 

Further information

Full publication details

Constitutional Intolerance: The Fashioning of the Other in Europe’s Constitutional Repertoires.
Comparative Constitutional Law and Policy. Cambridge University Press; 2025. 192 pages.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI.org): 10.1017/9781009473927.

A hardback edition is available for purchase from Cambridge University Press, priced at £100.

View this book on the publisher’s website (cambridge.org). 

University of Cambridge staff and students (and others with relevant subscriptions) can access the content online via the Cambridge Core (cambridge.org/core).

We look forward to hosting a book launch with Dr Van der Tol in due course.