The European Union Centre of Excellence and the Jean Monnet Chair are pleased to announce...

The Future of EU Citizenship

Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada October 18-19, 2012

Support for a supranational European citizenship preceded integration and the political genesis of the key rights of EU citizenship was in the negotiations that established the foundations of European integration in the early 1950s. Since then, the concept of EU citizenship has hardened into law, most famously in the Maastricht Treaty’s declaration that “Citizenship of the Union is hereby established” and the Court of Justice’s oft-repeated assertion that “Union citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States.” Today, as half a billion EU citizens worldwide enjoy a range of rights, the European Commission stresses the need to reinforce EU citizenship by revitalising the link between citizens and the EU and by giving real effect to their rights. Perhaps EU citizenship can most fruitfully be analyzed in terms of varieties of multilevel citizenship found in federal states or other cases of divided, overlapping, or nested sovereignty. Recent calls by European leaders to further deepen political integration and the leadup to 2013 as “the European Year of Citizens” demand analytical, interpretive, and normative considerations of the future of EU citizenship.

Thursday October 18

12:45 - 1:50 Session 1 The EU, Identity, and Member State Citizenships

Willem Maas, "The Future of EU Citizenship" (Welcome)

Kiran Banerjee, "Toward Postnational Citizenship in Europe? Tensions and Transformation in Germany" (abstract)

Matthew Spears, "Babel or Babble: Do Multilingual Abilities Make Europeans Feel More European?" (abstract)

2:00 - 3:30 Session 2 Conflicting Visions of EU Citizenship

Pete Mohanty, "Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in the European Union" (abstract)

Stefanie Pukallus, "European citizenship: Debate and the need for a ‘Europe of Agorai’?" (abstract)

Scott L. Greer, "European Social Citizenship in Europeanized Crisis" (abstract)

3:40 – 5:10 Session 3 Citizenship and Political Participation

Monica Threlfall, "Taxation Without Representation: How Much Does It Hurt?" (abstract)

Alex Street, "Political Participation Among Intra-EU Immigrants" (abstract)

John G. Francis, "European Citizenship and Cross-Border Voting Rights" (abstract)

Friday October 19

9:00 - 10:30 Session 4 EU Citizenship, Migration, and Residence

Diego Acosta and Jacopo Martire, "The Other and Us: What does EU Migration Law tell us about the Future of European Identity?" (abstract)

Stanisław Konopacki, "Europe and European Citizenship in Time of Crisis" (abstract)

Nathan Cambien, "EU Citizenship and its Impact on Member State Immigration. Some Potentially Perverse Side-effects from Recent ECJ Case Law" (abstract)

10:40 - 12:10 Session 5 Citizenship, Education, and Passion

Avril Keating, "The Future of EU Citizenship and the Role of Socialisation, Schools, and Students" (abstract)

F. Peter Wagner, "Citizenship as Missing Link: European Integration and the Question of a European Identity" (abstract)

Janet Laible, "Does EU Citizenship Need Roots? Possibilities for Enhancing the Affective Dimension of Political Citizenship in the EU" (abstract)

12:10 - 1:10 Lunch

1:10 - 2:10 Session 6 Future Scenarios for EU Citizenship

Dimitry Kochenov, "The Citizenship Paradigm of European Integration" (abstracts)

Rainer Bauböck, "The Future of EU Citizenship: Disintegration, Negative or Positive integration?" (abstract)

2:20 – 3:45 Publication discussion with authors

Because these papers are being prepared for publication, they are password-protected. If you would like to read papers, please contact the authors directly.

Back to top

Author biographies

Diego Acosta (PhD King’s College London) is member of the Sheffield Centre for International and European Law Research Cluster at Sheffield University. He is author of The Long-Term Residence Status as a Subsidiary Form of EU Citizenship. An Analysis of Directive 2003/109 (Martinus Nijhoff, 2011) and editor of a new three volume book on global migration issues. He also works as a freelance consultant for LexisNexis London.

Kiran Banerjee is PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research is concerned with mapping out tensions between discourses of national citizenship and human rights as manifest in contemporary conceptions of democratic legitimacy, in particular as they relate to issues raised by immigration. At present he is working on exploring the dynamics of transnational and supra-national forms of membership within the context of contemporary Europe.

Rainer Bauböck (PhD Vienna) holds the Chair in Social and Political Theory, European University Institute, Florence. He is author of Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration, four books in German, and Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship, and editor or co-editor of fourteen books or journal special issues.

Nathan Cambien (MJur Oxford; PhD Leuven) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for European law, Leuven University and a member of the Brussels bar. In 2011 he completed his PhD entitled “Citizenship of the Union as a cornerstone of European integration: a study of its impact on policies and competences of the Member States.”

John G. Francis (PhD Michigan) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah and was Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Utah from 1996-2011. For the last six months, he has also been a Beaufort Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. His research interests include citizenship and migration, federalism, and politics and public health regulation.

Scott L. Greer (PhD Northwestern) is Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research focuses on health policy making in the United States and European Union. Author or editor of six books, his most recent are The Politics of European Union Health Policies andDevolution and Social Citizenship in the UK.

Avril Keating (PhD Cambridge) is an Anglo-German Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, where she is completing a monograph on the ways in which EU citizenship is constructed (and mediated) through education policy at different levels (supra-national, national, and individual). The book is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan and is entitled Educating for European citizenship: European policies, national adaptations, and young people’s practices. Some early findings from this project were published in Citizenship Studies and the Journal of Curriculum Studies. From September 2012, Avril will take up a position as a Lecturer in comparative sociology of education at the University of East Anglia.

Dimitry Kochenov (LL.M. CEU Budapest; LL.D. Groningen) holds a Chair of European Constitutional Law in Groningen. Besides numerous articles in the leading periodicals he is the author of EU Enlargement and the Failure of Conditionality (Kluwer Law International, 2008); co-author of Schurende rechtsordes (Europa Law, 2008) and an editor of EU Law of the Overseas (Kluwer Law International, 2011) and EU's Shaping of the International Legal Order (Cambridge University Press, 2013 (with Fabian Amtenbrink)).

Stanisław Konopacki (PhD, habilitation Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań) is Jean Monnet Chair, Associate Professor Faculty of International Studies Political Science University of Łódź, Chair of European Integration at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. He is the author of European integration and postmodernism (1998); European citizenship in the context of Polish accession to the EU; (2005); Poland in drifting Europe (2011) co-author Changing Europe. Identities, Nations, Citizens (Routledge 2002)

Janet Laible (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US. Her research focuses on problems of sovereignty, nationalism, and institutional transformation, with particular interests in the European Union and the United Kingdom. She is currently developing a project that examines the impact of European integration on domestic welfare systems, with a focus on EU efforts to provide social protection for Europe’s increasingly mobile labor force. She is the author of Separatism and Sovereignty in the New Europe: Party Politics and the Meanings of Statehood in a Supranational Context (Palgrave Macmillan: 2008) and co-editor with Henri J. Barkey of European Responses to Globalization: Resistance, Adaptation and Alternatives (Elsevier JAI Press, 2006).

Willem Maas (PhD Yale) is Jean Monnet Chair, Associate Professor, and Director of the EU Centre of Excellence at Glendon College, York University. He is author of Creating European Citizens and editor of the forthcoming books Democratic Citizenship and the Free Movement of People and Multilevel Citizenship.

Jacopo Martire (PhD King’s College London) is at the University of Stirling and revising his doctoral thesis for publication, provisionally titled “Passages of Modern Law: from Sovereignty to Normalization and beyond” and aims at contributing to the debate over the nature of the contemporary legal system by offering a Foucauldian genealogical account of the modern state and its law.

Pete Mohanty, PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, is originally from Stony Brook, New York. Before coming to UT, he spent two years working as a canvass director in New York and Philadelphia. He attended Swarthmore College, where he was an honors student of political science and history, which he also studied as an exchange student at the Free University of Berlin. His dissertation focuses on the politics of immigration in Europe and combines his interests in normative political theory and empirical research.

Stefanie Pukallus is a research fellow at the Centre for the Freedom of the Media and a final year PhD student at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her doctoral thesis is entitled ‘A study of the representations of European citizenship as publicly communicated by the European Commission 1951-­‐2012’. She holds a BA in ‘Administration et affaires internationales’ from the Université Paris XII, a MA in ‘Sciences de l’information et de la communication: communication d’entreprise’ from the Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III and a ‘MA Communication publique et politique en France et en Europe’ from the Université Paris XII.

Matthew Spears is a 5th-year PhD student in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation examines the extent to which a salient European identity influences EU citizens’ willingness to lend economic support to fellow Europeans. Additional research projects probe the causal relationships between language acquisition and a sense of European identity and between European identity and support for the EU.

Alex Street (PhD Berkeley) is currently a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute, and will spend the 2012-13 academic year at Cornell University. His dissertation, entitled Citizenship Begins at Home: How Families Shape Immigrant Incorporation, shows that the decision whether to naturalize is typically taken not by isolated individuals but in the context of the family. This helps explain otherwise puzzling developments in the numbers taking German citizenship since a major reform of citizenship law in the year 2000.

Monica Threlfall (PhD Loughborough) is Reader in European Politics, Institute for the Study of European Transformations-ISET, London Metropolitan University, UK. She has recently completed a DG Research Integrated Project on “Feeling represented? Citizens' perspectives on their political representation, with particular regard to their gender, ethnicity, and nationality” which was part of a wider FP6 project Gendered Citizenship in a Multicultural Europe-FEMCIT.

F. Peter Wagner (PhD Rutgers) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater. Publications include “A Finger for Berlusconi: Italy’s anti-immigration/anti-crime measures, Romanian realities, and the poverty of European citizenship” and, with Sabrina P. Ramet, “Post-Socialist Models of Rule in Central and Southeastern Europe” in Sabrina P. Ramet, ed., Central and Southeastern Europe since 1989.

Back to top

Paper abstracts

The Other and Us: What does EU Migration Law tell us about the Future of European Identity?

Diego Acosta and Jacopo Martire

The question of who is the “legal Other” within the context of EU law is becoming increasingly important. This is due mainly to three distinct but interconnected factors: 1) defining who is the legal Other is fundamental for delineating a proper European identity in the making, especially in the face of the process of enlargement of the EU; 2) new waves of immigrants with their baggage of socio-political needs are questioning more and more the European regime concerning the integration of Third Country Nationals, posing a thorny issue at the national and supranational level; 3) the European approach to the legal Other will have potentially dramatic consequences at a geopolitical level now that other supranational entities similar to the EU (e.g. MERCOSUR) are emerging, possibly igniting mirror-like policies that will negatively affect the rights of European citizens outside the borders of the EU. This paper analyses the framework of EU migration law and its most recent developments in order to propose a theoretical reworking of the figure of the legal Other within the context of European law. Such critical analysis will allow us to critically assess the question of the contested idea of a European identity and the geopolitical effects of the fragmented landscape of EU’s migration policies with the view of offering some positive suggestions on how to overcome the current impasse we are facing in both areas. The argument is structured as follows. First, we delineate the contours of EU migration law, shedding light on the complex and varied regimes applicable to non-EU individuals. Secondly, we claim that the dichotomy legal Us/Other - which is generally accepted in the field of European studies – is a false one. Building on our legal analysis wesuggest that there is a gap in the current theoretical understanding of the Other. Underneath the generic umbrella term of the Other, a number of sub-categories of alterity are hidden, but none of them schemes properly reflects the figure of the outsider in today’s EU policies. We then go beyond the spectrum of Otherness currently offered by contemporary thinkers, and maintain that the outsider, in the context of the EU legal framework, is increasingly treated as a “Xenos”, a radical Other that we cannot ignore but we reject and ostracize, something that is fundamentally alien to our society and that should be distrusted and subjugated. Finally, we argue against such trend defending an idea of the Other as someone that is fundamental in building our own identity through a dialectical process of ethical recognition and political integration. Such conception has to be embraced and implemented both at a legal and institutional level if the faltering European project is to survive and to produce significant positive effects at a geopolitical level.

Toward Postnational Citizenship in Europe? Tensions and Transformation in Germany

Kiran Bannerjee

This paper looks to contemporary debates about the emergence of post-national and transnational regimes of membership within Europe and analyzes their significance as potential challenges to exclusionary conceptions of citizenship and the state. Taking seriously the claims of scholars that transnational institutions like European Union citizenship promise to erode the tension between the rights of nationals and the rights of others, this paper examines transformations in citizenship within Germany to argue that present dynamics of inclusion are normatively ambivalent. While recent shifts in the legal status of EU citizenship do herald the emergence of a robust form of transnational status, these transformations only highlight the growing gap between the rights of Europeans and nationals from outside the EU for whom limited access to national citizenship remains a concern. These divergent developments have in part been produced by an activist European Court of Justice, which has done much to expand the scope and significance of EU citizenship in remarkable ways. Yet at the same time, recent extensions of EU citizenship have done little to affect the status of third-country nationals. Because of this, I develop a systematic critique of the postnationalist perspective from the standpoint of Germany’s third-country nationals, suggesting that the status of this group is tantamount to that of second-class citizenship. Moreover, I argue that recognizing these contradictory dynamics is normatively important for scholars to acknowledge because of the promissory role the EU frequently plays in the work of scholars of citizenship. In truth the contemporary politics of inclusion indicates a far less sanguine present. The paper begins by explaining the importance of the German context for assessing transformations of citizenship beyond the national: as host to the EU’s largest population of both EU national and third-country nationals Germany stands as a crucial case for claims about the transformation of citizenship in Europe. From here the paper moves to a conceptual clarification of the postnationalist position – that the modes of identity, bundles of rights, and status traditionally accorded through national membership are becoming decoupled from citizenship, nationhood, and the nation state. The central goal of the paper is to assess these propositions in light of recent developments in the continued evolution of European Union citizenship status and German domestic citizenship law. I argue that taking these features into account leads to an ambivalent, though provocative, normative perspective on the emergence of postnational and transnational trends. Questions of nationality remain central to the status of Germany’s non-European migrant population. Even in the wake of a substantive liberalization of German citizenship law, the dynamics surrounding Germany’s third-country migrant populations point toward the continued importance of national citizenship, both in the ways membership is conceived in German political discourse, as exemplified in continued opposition to dual nationality, and in the ambivalent response of migrants themselves to the recent naturalization reforms. Yet alongside this, very recent transformations in European Union Citizenship, and their concomitant implications within Germany, do point to the belated emergence of an, albeit narrowly accessible, postnational form of membership. I conclude by suggesting that even as postnationalist trends are emerging as a reality, we ought to remain far from optimistic about the normative implications of such developments and recognize that we may be witnessing the contingent coexistence of multiple regimes of membership within Europe. The incipient postnational status instantiated in Germany within the context of the EU is highly selective, and while generating a class of rather privileged and protected transnational citizens, exists alongside the continued political exclusion of the majority of Germany’s non-European migrants, producing a situation of normatively problematic multi-tiered membership.

The Future of EU Citizenship: Disintegration, Negative or Positive integration?

Rainer Bauböck

EU citizenship status is derivative of member state nationality, but EU citizenship rights are largely derived from residence and activated through free movement. In the past, this tension has created some productive dynamics, but it looks like an unsustainable construction for the future. We can imagine three scenarios: a general disintegration of the EU that will lead to a renationalization of citizenship and corresponding restrictions of free movement; a negative integration scenario in which increased EU citizen mobility will force member states to harmonize rules for acquisition and loss of citizenship; and a positive integration scenario in which EU citizenship is conceptualized as a response to the democratic legitimacy deficit in the EU polity. I will argue that this latter scenario is normatively preferable, even if not necessarily more probable, and that it should not disconnect EU from member state citizenship, but rather integrate both into a coherent multilevel conception of a supranational polity.

EU Citizenship and its Impact on Member State Immigration. Some Potentially Perverse Side-effects from Recent ECJ Case Law

Nathan Cambien

One of the most important rights attached to EU citizenship is the right for EU citizens to move and reside in the Member States, together with their close family members. According to traditional case law, this right could only be invoked by EU citizens who had left their home Member State. This had the unfortunate consequence that the majority of EU citizens did not enjoy the right under EU law to be accompanied by their family members in their Member State of residence. Recently, the ECJ has reversed to some extent its traditional case law. In revolutionary judgements like Rottmann and Ruiz Zambrano, the ECJ recognised that even ‘static’ EU citizens can, under certain circumstances, invoke their EU citizenship rights. In subsequent cases the ECJ has confirmed this innovative interpretation of the scope of EU citizenship, although it appears to limit it to rather narrowly defined circumstances. Prima facie, this innovative case law would seem to hugely increase the value of EU citizenship and enhance the effective enjoyment of the rights attached to it, the right to be accompanied by family members in particular. However, my paper shows that the ECJ’s innovative interpretation, while driven by noble motives, is not, in fact, a step in the right direction. Limited though it may be, the reversal in the ECJ’s case law will have a significant impact on the immigration laws and policies of the Member States. There is a realistic fear that EU Member States will try to counter this impact by 1) giving an overly narrow implementation to the said ECJ case law, 2) restricting their nationality legislation to prevent EU citizenship from coming into play and 3) restricting their immigration legislation in order to reduce the possibilities for family reunification. The potential for such counter-reactions is perfectly illustrated by recent changes in Belgian nationality and immigration law. My paper argues that this situation runs counter to the aims pursued by the EU citizenship provisions and examines possible ways to avoid this undesirable outcome. It is argued that the most effective way to solve these problems would be through intervention of the EU legislator in the field of nationality and through expansion of the current EU legislative framework for family reunification. In the absence of legislative intervention, the way forward seems to be in the better articulation and explanation of the precise scope of the EU citizenship provisions and the progressive enforcement of fundamental EU law principles such as the principle of proportionality, the principle of legitimate expectations and fundamental rights. The responsibility for this lies largely with the ECJ itself, but partially also with the political EU institutions and Member State authorities.

European Citizenship and Cross-Border Voting Rights

John G. Francis

This paper is a proposal for strengthening cross-border voting rights for European citizens. It argues that improved understanding of why people change residency from one member state to another together with full voting rights in more than one country will contribute to greater electoral participation and by extension broader European representation. Being a citizen in most sovereign states does not assure voting rights, nor does being a recognized resident necessarily provide access to the voting box. Voting regimes are usually an admixture of citizenship and residential rules. It is often recognized that the exercise of the franchise can be problematic for the person who moves across borders. European Union citizenship with its right for electoral participation in another country is innovative in addressing the problem of citizen movement. It is, however, often disappointing in practice, for few migrating European citizens opt to vote in their new state of residence. It is also incomplete, applying only to votes in European Parliamentary elections and in local elections. The European citizen who moves from one state to another is allowed to vote only once in European Parliamentary elections, but may do so either in her land of national citizenship or the land where she is now residing. The citizen is also given the right to vote in local elections where she is now residing or back home. But apparently the European citizen is not prohibited from voting in both local elections. The paper begins with a review of findings that few migrating Europeans vote when they move across member state boundaries. It then asks how might this absence of participation be addressed. Explanations vary as to this lack of interest. E.U. surveys suggest citizens are not well informed as to voting rights and how to exercise them. Some prominent scholars as well as advocacy groups argue that the voting rights of European citizens should be extended to national elections given the importance assigned to national electoral outcomes in Europe. This paper shares the concern that voting rates should be increased, particularly for migrating citizens. This may be best achieved by understanding why people move and by expanding the range of voting rights that a citizen may exercise in more than one country at the same time. Many Europeans citizens who move from one member state to another are either younger people seeking jobs or educational experience to help with their careers back home or they are older people, often retired, dividing their time between two member states. In short, these are citizens who may develop multiple attachments sometimes briefly and sometimes for longer periods of time to more than one member state. Their opportunities for political participation should coincide with their attachment to more than one state. That is, they should be enabled to vote in all elections in both states. This proposal is not all that different in substance from what many people around the planet can now do as dual citizens of more than one sovereign state. It is an opportunity to bring to the act of voting more than one state’s perspective and to sustain ongoing attachments to more than one state. This proposal is unlikely to result in a vast new enfranchisement of citizens, as at any given time only 13 million people out of nearly 500 million European citizens are residents of another member state. But consideration of this proposal may allow for a better understanding of the political dimension of free movement.

European Social Citizenship in Europeanized Crisis

Scott L. Greer

The European Union has always had a pronounced constitutional asymmetry: its treaty bases and legal system- indeed, its basic institutional logic- made it far better at market integration and regulation than at the construction and defense of a model of social citizenship. On one side of the scales sat the power of the internal market treaty bases, the Court of Justice, and the repeated success of integrative mechanisms such as mutual recognition. On the other side sat a variety of grant programs and various forms of declarative and soft law, most notably the Open Method of Coordination. The result was that the EU was an agent for the expansion of civil rights and markets more than any European Social Model or social citizenship. It might have exposed welfare states to greater competitive pressures, but it did not make the kinds of policies on pensions and health care that would change the shape and meaning of social citizenship rights and responsibilities. Since the start of the financial crisis, the range of policy tools within the EU has changed, with marked effects on both EU politics and the EU’s effects on member states’ welfare states and social citizenship. The financial vulnerability of peripheral Eurozone states has led the “troika” of the Commission, IMF, and ECB to start specifying detailed spending plans for welfare services in the peripheral states. This power- a manifestation of financial power within the Eurozone- creates a wholly policy instrument whose effects are already visible, and which affects the meaning and effects of other policy instruments such as the OMC, which is now being used as both a template for austerity and a form of opposition to the cuts. This paper analyzes the new fiscal policy tools and their structural effects on welfare expenditure in the member states- and therefore on the extent to which the EU can claim to sustain a social model.

The Future of EU Citizenship and the Role of Socialisation, Schools, and Students

Avril Keating

There has been increased interest in the role of citizens in European integration over the past decade or so as it has become increasingly apparent that the European public(s) have shifted from a position of ‘permissive consensus’ to one of ‘constraining dissensus’. The attendant research has sought to explain the roots or predictors of EU citizens’ attitudes and voting behaviours, and has established that cognitive engagement, socio-economic incentives, and collective (national) identities and group threats can all play a key role in shaping individual-level attitudes and behaviours towards European integration. This paper seeks to add to this sub-field by examining the role of socialisation in the citizen-formation process, and in particular on the role of national citizenship education policies. Schools are a key site of socialisation for children and young people, providing students not only with the information and skills to become citizens, but also with the values, attitudes, and behaviours that expected of ‘good’ citizens in their community. Historically, the ‘community’ in question was the nation, as state education policies used school curricula and textbooks to demarcate the boundaries of the state, assert their legitimacy, and establish a citizenry. These policies sought to establish the nation-state as the sole and exclusive site of citizenship, with outsiders (such as citizens of neighbouring European countries) “Other-ed” and excluded. It has been argued that these exclusionary national narratives have waned, and the notion of multiple and post-national citizenship identities have come widely accepted. Yet it is also clear that national attachments have not disappeared, and that the nation-state remains a potent source of identification for Europeans. This paper examines thus examines whether national citizenship education policies play a role in the persistence of these national attachments, and, moreover, whether these policies play a role in shaping (or limiting) the emergence of EU citizenship practices among young Europeans. To address these questions, this paper draws on data from the 2009 International Civics and Citizenship Study (ICCS), which included a European Regional Module (ERM) that surveyed student knowledge of, exposure to, and attitudes towards European integration. Using multi-level modelling of this data, I argue that national education policies do play a role in socialising young people’s attitudes towards EU citizenship, but do so in somewhat unexpected ways. In particular, countries that place more emphasis on educating their citizens for national identity do not, as one might expect, lead to lower levels of European identity. Instead, there is a positive relationship between European and national identity, so that young people are more likely to express a European identity if their country places greater emphasis on national identity. Some of the reasons for this are teased out in the conclusion of this paper, supported by qualitative data on the relationship between national and European citizenship narratives in contemporary educational texts. In addition, the conclusion also considers the implications of this for the future of EU citizenship.

The Citizenship Paradigm of European Integration

Dimitry Kochenov

The current economic cross-border paradigm of EU integration is deficient in a number of important ways, undermining inter alia legitimacy, equality, legal certainty and failing to demonstrate rationality of the law at its base. Its ethical foundations are missing: a vision of justice based on the assumption that moving around is good for you is flawed. To ensure the continuation of European integration, the ideological underpinnings of the project have to be rethought. My paper starts with Sen’s idea of the pursuit of human fulfilment in order to present the EU as a mechanism of individual empowerment tailored to broaden citizen’s horizon of opportunity. A new legal paradigm of EU federalism is proposed, taking the concept of citizenship as a starting point. The proposed new paradigm, which draws on the ideology of the Schuman declaration and the idea of the Union for the citizens dating back to van Gend en Loos is fully in line with the current text of the Treaties and has even been tested out by the Court in Eman & Sevinger, Rottmann and a number of other cases. Viable alternatives to the elevation of citizenship to the core systemic factor of the division of competences between the EU and the Member States as well as of justification and rationalisation of the process of integration do not exist. Both the disintegration scenarios and the continuation of the status quo arguments will be dismissed through legal-historical analysis and scrutiny of the basic spill-over effects of market integration into other areas. As long as we know that de facto Europe is not only about the fundamental freedoms and market integration, pretending that the contrary is true is harmful for the legitimacy of the integration exercise and functionality of EU law.

Europe and European Citizenship in the Time of Crisis

Stanisław Konopacki

The financial and economic crisis in Europe which started in 2008 uncovers deep divisions in Europe (North-South; poor – better off; within euro-zone; euro-zone – EU etc). But the crisis should be seen in a broader context: 1) 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, communist bloc, the end of Cold War and the bipolar world order. The EU faced the challenge of enlarging to include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that were longing for a “return to Europe”. After initial enthusiasm, the older member states feared the accession of “poor cousins”. 2) Developments initiated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to increased fear of Islam and immigrants. 3) The rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005 was also a symptom of fear of new members and immigrants pouring to the EU from all over the world. On the other hand European citizenship allows or allowed for the exclusion of certain groups of European citizens from their very basic right: free movement of persons. 1) Citizens of new member states who for seven years (2004-2011) were excluded from the labour markets of old member states. 2) Long term legal third country nationals (not EU citizens). 3) Economically non-active Union citizens (retired persons, students etc) who can enjoy the right of free movement if they meet certain economic criteria. The paper addresses the question of whether there is anything which combines these two phenomena and is common to them. I conclude that these two phenomena reveal a much deeper problem – a crisis of European identity. Europe has a serious problem with encounters with the Other, which is one of the main challenges Europe is facing at the turn of century. In other words, the old continent is not open to Otherness and this ‘Western enclosure’ is a fundamental feature of European modern identity. Western rationality as well as Western social practice have been developing in the act of exclusion, fear, limitation, egoism and drawing a border between itself and the Other. In order to meet the challenge of encounter with the Other, Europe must overcome its limitations and develop a new identity able to deal and communicate with the Other.

Does EU Citizenship Need Roots? Possibilities for Enhancing the Affective Dimension of Political Citizenship in the EU

Janet Laible

The formal introduction of European Union citizenship in the Maastricht Treaty heralded a novel understanding of political community based on a common set of European rights, embedded in the existing citizenship regimes of EU member states. But are the rights of EU citizenship sufficient to bind hundreds of millions of Europeans to a common project that increasingly seems to ask for material sacrifices and difficult social compromises along with its benefits? Recent history suggests that de jure European citizenship is not sufficient to build an enduring political community (although a similar observation could apply to any modern polity). However, the intensity of criticisms that have emerged in the context of the current economic crisis suggests that the construction of shared political commitments among European citizens remains particularly shaky. In this paper, I argue that the EU has fewer options than did earlier nationalizing polities for promoting affective ties among its citizens. The EU confronts (as its member states once confronted, and as some still confront), fragmented and diverse political communities, a range of pre-existing political allegiances, and significant challenges to its legitimacy. In earlier periods, states and empires could seek to sustain their legitimacy and to build political communities by drawing on a variety of “national” narratives, including myths of shared suffering and defeat, assertions of shared ancestry, linkages to “sacred spaces” and to (literal) earth, and stories of civic identity based on shared values and ideals that were theoretically accessible to all citizens. I will establish in this paper that most of these options are politically unavailable at the supranational level in Europe, and that the latter option, civic identity, is precisely the field in which the EU struggles to foster emotional resonances among its citizens. In contrast, the emotionally powerful linkage between land (soil) and political community is politically fraught, given its associations with war, ethnic identity and blood descent. However, I propose that EU citizenship could gain traction by building on the existing emotional “residue” of rural Europe in a manner that would recast the “the rural” in ways that express the values of a liberal, inclusive, democratic European polity. I argue that with a narrative of political community that focuses on commitments to environmental sustainability and to ecological integrity, the EU would advance a radically progressive foundation for citizenship that would have broad political support and that would facilitate political identification among its citizens. This is not a call for the EU to take a larger role in environmental policymaking. Instead, it is the outline of a new appeal that the EU can make to its citizens, to understand themselves as part of a moral community founded upon a shared recognition of the intrinsic value of the natural world. This appeal has the virtue of already having deep grounding in citizen politics at the local, member state and European levels. Yet this is not a traditional environmentalist narrative and thus could reach constituencies that are not regularly considered “environmentalist.” The focus of this grounding for European citizenship would be the idea of a shared environmental legacy, and the potential for shared loss, even catastrophe, without social solidarity around such a legacy. The EU could thus activate much of the emotional content linked to earlier (and often less liberal) nation-building discourses, while advancing a vision of a Europe dedicated to democracy, social responsibility and justice.

Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in the European Union

Pete Mohanty

The European Union is under enormous strain. This paper develops a theory of the major ideological divides of this crisis and, using surveys, demonstrates that they are the major contours of EU public opinion. Specifically, the key to understanding what Europeans want from EU citizenship is understanding to what extent people embrace—or reject—two types of egalitarianism. The first dimension is an economic continuum from capitalism to socialism. As the EU moves in fits towards fiscal union, some of the most fiercely contested questions are about what economic equality should mean for EU citizens. The world witnessed months of popular uprisings about the sanctity of the welfare state, to which degree economies should be regulated democratically, and the amount of forgiveness creditors should extend to debtors. The second dimension of egalitarianism—political membership—runs along a continuum from localism to cosmopolitanism. European countries have long been confronted by the question of “who belongs” because of integration and migration. People translate cultural notions of belonging into political notions of membership in terms I analyze as “thick” and “thin.” “Thick values” reflect the way of life of a community; “thin values” reflect basic claims to decency that can be recognized across diverse moral communities. Democracy is based on three interlocking principles—inclusiveness, competitiveness, and sovereignty—that are in constant tension. Immigration consistently challenges democracy by exacerbating tensions between inclusiveness and sovereignty: are all adults, regardless of origin, politically equal or can majorities restrict membership through legislation? This challenge is particularly acute in the EU, where citizenship acquis makes citizenship more inclusive than it would otherwise be while acquis remains: (1) relatively agnostic about what type of sovereignty is necessary for that citizenship and (2) relatively exclusive towards third country nationals. When inclusiveness and current forms of sovereignty cannot be fostered at the same time, those with thin values tend to prioritize inclusiveness (and expanded European institutions to protect inclusiveness) and those with thick values tend to prioritize national sovereignty (because they consider exclusiveness necessary to maintain local tradition). The recent attempt by Sarkozy, for example, to expel Roma suggests the thin right to free movement and residence within the EU has outpaced thick cultural acceptance in France. Because of the inclusivity of EU citizenship, the EU’s legitimacy is deeply tied to the politics of thick and thin. This paper builds on my forthcoming work, which shows that thick values cause opposition to immigration and support for right-wing politics in the EU (and thin the reverse). I analyze three EU-wide surveys using multilevel models that are ideal for identifying EU-wide trends while remaining sensitive to national context. I use the 2008 European Values Study to show that thin values increase support for the EU. Europeans aren’t necessarily economically egalitarian to the same extent that they are politically egalitarian, so I use Europolis, a survey taken shortly before the last European parliamentary elections, to show what voters expect from the major electoral blocs. Finally, I use the 2011 Special Eurobarometer on the EU’s future to show how Europeans in crisis prioritize political and economic egalitarianism. Those with thick and thin values disagree considerably about whether the EU should equalize living standards, embrace multiculturalism, and build European institutions over the next two decades. Whether the EU will build on its current citizenship paradigm and develop into a liberal democracy or a social democracy or depart from it towards a loose alliance of states depends on which one of these ideological constellations is successful.

The Future of European Citizenship: A Return to Wallström’s Europe of Agorai?

Stefanie Pukallus

This paper argues that the Barroso II Commission (2010-2014) with Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, conceives of European citizenship as a civil‐legal form of citizenship with a particular focus on economic‐social citizenship rights. European citizens exercise their rights in the setting of the single market when they ‘sign a contract in a cross‐border situation, when they shop online, when they want to enforce a court decision cross‐border, when a bi‐national couple wants to get married or divorced, (...) when a person living outside his home country wants to write a will’ or when European citizens travel, study, found companies, shop or inherit. In this understanding of European citizenship, the civil force of law in a European civil society circumscribed by legal institutions is, so Reding hopes a, contribution to the emergence of European civil solidarity amongst European citizens and ultimately, to the emergence of a Rechtsgemeinschaft. Accordingly the Commission’s public communication strategy for European citizenship focuses on the practical and concrete policy results and benefits European citizens gain from the single market. However, on the back of the Eurozone crisis Reding has recently begun to emphasize that ‘(...) democracies cannot function without the link between the citizens and those who govern’ and has argued that in the near future, three occasions will be used to restore confidence amongst citizens through interaction, engagement, consultations and dialogue. These are first, the European Citizenship Report 2013, second the European Year of Citizens (EYC) 2013 and finally the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2014. The paper analyzes why Reding’s conception of European civil‐legal citizenship needs to change and how these three occasions appear to both confirm this need as well as herald a return to Wallström’s ‘Europe of Agorai’ with its emphasis on spaces of citizen engagement (Agorai), communicative institutions that facilitate debate and dialogue between European citizens and European institutions, and what she called a ‘long term democratic reform process’ of the European Union based upon a philosophy of ‘listening.’ I conclude that once again the Commission appears to be aware of the fact that without a European wide civil society – one more broadly conceived of than one based upon predominantly legal institutions – European citizenship will remain a hollow paean that resides in the rhetoric and thin concepts of Maastricht and as such, these three occasions listed above need to be understood as ‘kick starting’ the latest attempt to facilitate the development of European civil society replete with engaged and active European citizens and more interestingly appear to herald a return to a concern for spaces of engagement (Agorai) and effective communicative institutions between European citizens and European institutions.

Babel or Babble: Do Multilingual Abilities Make Europeans Feel More European?

Matthew Spears

Scholars—and policymakers alike—posit that a sense of European citizenship contributes to deeper support for EU institutions. In this vein, over the past fifteen years researchers of European public opinion have begun to use individuals’ feelings of attachment to their nation and Europe—that is, their identities—to predict support for the EU. Identity-based explanations are seen as a complement to, rather than a replacement of, utilitarian models where economic benefits of EU membership are used to explain support for the EU. Nonetheless, the statistically strong association between European identification and EU support has sent scholars on a search for the antecedents of this identity. This search has made us more capable of describing the types of people who identify as European. Although the individual characteristics vary by country, people who express attachment to Europe are typically well educated, younger, and male. European identifiers also are more likely to have traveled to other European countries and are more likely to speak foreign languages than those who identify solely with their nation. What we know less about is the extent to which these characteristics actually cause people to identify with Europe. This study also seeks to contribute more broadly to our understanding of the degree to which EU elites and others may be capable of engendering greater support for the European Union in a time when European integration is no longer associated with economic security and growth. The question is if the EU can foster a sense of attachment to Europe—and with it, greater support for the EU—without direct economic incentives. It is unlikely that being male causes European identification, although education, travel, and language ability might. Using matching methodology in order to best adjust for differences between monolingual and bilingual survey respondents, I intend to test the effects on European identity of one theoretically and practically relevant factor: Namely, to what extent does learning one foreign European language induce a change in one’s sense of attachment to Europe? The answer to this question potentially has serious implications for policymakers. For example, if European identity (and, by extension, mass support for the EU) can be fostered through language acquisition, the EU has an impetus to devote more of its resources and energies toward fostering multilingualism. However, if identification with Europe is more closely related to social class and the economic benefits of EU membership, the EU would need to pursue other—potentially costlier—methods if it wishes to increase mass identification with Europe. The results of this test also have implications for academics as we go about disentangling the effects of identity and economics on support for EU integration and institutions. If the explanatory power of factors such as language ability are washed away when we compare the strength of European identification among members of equivalent social standing, scholars of European identity will need to do a better job explicating how the relationship between identities and social class contribute to our understanding of European integration. If class determines both European identification and support for EU institutions, it is unclear what added benefit identity provides to our understanding of public support for the EU. In brief, when bilinguals are compared to otherwise similar monolinguals in terms of education, the analysis finds little inter-group difference in terms of European identification. Based on the analysis that follows, it appears that language abilities are not systematically able to overcome the class-based divide that separates those who identify with Europe and those who do not in the majority of EU member states.

Political Participation Among Intra-EU Immigrants

Alex Street

Over 12 million E.U. citizens currently live in a member state of which they are not nationals. Several million more who migrated between E.U. member states have since ‘naturalized’ to acquire the nationality of their new homelands. In a sense, these intra-E.U. migrants are the true E.U. citizens, since they have taken advantage of the right of free movement to live in another member state. However, relatively few of them make use of their political rights as E.U. citizens, to vote or stand for office in local elections and in elections to the European Parliament. Why is this? Why are intra-E.U. migrants more likely to participate in some contexts than in others? And, more broadly, what can intra-E.U. migrants teach us about the factors that make people more or less likely to engage with politics? In this paper, I use data from the European Social Survey to describe and explain variation in levels and forms of political participation among intra-E.U. migrants. The great advantage of these data is that they provide individual-level information on both migrants and indigenous residents of the origin and destination countries. I pool data from surveys fielded between 2002 and 2009 to obtain serviceable samples of intra-E.U. migrants. I construct statistical models to predict participation among non-immigrant residents of each E.U. member state. The focus is on participation in elections and on attitudes towards the institutions of government, both in the country of residence and at the European level. I use the coefficients from a) the model for residents of the origin country, and b) the model for residents of the destination country, to predict participation among intra-E.U. migrants in each origin-destination dyad. I then compare predicted to observed levels of participation. This approach promises to reveal not only the individual characteristics associated with more or less participation among intra-E.U. migrants, but also the features of origin and destination countries, and the interactions between the two, that are most conducive to participation. Much of the existing research on E.U. citizenship has focused on treaties, institutions and policy-making elites. This paper aims to complement this literature with a bottom-up perspective. To appreciate the promise and the limits of the project of E.U. citizenship, both approaches are needed. The paper will help us to understand when, how and why intra-E.U. migrants make use of their political rights as E.U. citizens.

Taxation Without Representation: How Much Does It Hurt?

Monica Threlfall

Although the EU launched its first citizenship programme in 1992 with considerable fanfare, arguably nothing much changed for employees who had already moved to another member-state. True, the system of aggregation of entitlements and “pro-ratarisation” is continually being perfected. But in terms of political citizenship - traditionally understood as the right to vote and to stand for election - free movers both then and subsequently gained few new rights. Their right to vote for the government of the day remains fully curtailed by nationality barriers: “the denial of rights remains the status quo.” So while the number of employees moving to jobs in other MS may be increasing at a faster rate than before 1992, the result is, arguably, an increase in taxpayers who cannot vote for the government that decides what to do with their taxes - return to taxation without representation. As a phenomenon, this can hardly be considered a democratic step forward, especially in the midst of new discourses on European Citizenship. Against this background, it is pertinent to ask free movers whether this in fact matters to them. It remains the case that even if they did not care, their lack of rights constitutes an anomaly that should be studied by national policymakers and at the intergovernmental level. In this respect the research draws on the many points made in a key text on the topic. This paper reports findings of a research project in which focus groups were conducted in four countries with non-nationals who do not vote for the national parliament of the country they live in, specifically the UK, Spain, Poland and Macedonia. The methodology for this took some cues from a validation of qualitative approaches to investigating people's awareness of political issues through conversations rather than surveys. The topics of the focus group discussions were far more wide-ranging that the simple answers to the question Can you vote? And if you cannot, do you mind? They explored additionally the broader concept of what it means to feel politically represented or not represented; of what systemic features of representation systems facilitate these feelings; and which personal traits and political characteristics of elected representatives contribute to generating feelings of being represented and taken into account. Participants also debated at what level they most wanted to be able to vote, other than the local, at which they already can. Particular effort was made in the study to explore the presence of gender, ethnicity and religion in non-nationals' preferences for engaging with actual or hypothetical representatives. Additionally national and naturalised participants in focus groups were asked to consider potential regimes to allow newcomers to gain the vote in national elections. The research findings, reflecting a qualitative design - albeit one containing a novel quantitative exercise performed by participants - contain some rare insights into an issue for which stakeholders have rarely been asked for their opinion, especially not at a comparative level. The findings remain nonetheless qualitative in nature but offer the basis for further representative sample survey work.

Citizenship as Missing Link: European Integration and the Question of a European Identity

F. Peter Wagner

Citizenship has clearly become on of the central categories in the study of the EU and European integration today. However, that centrality is derived from and reflects the controversy and questions that surround the process of European integration itself as a process and product wedged and at times torn between supranational commitments and continuing national prerogatives within the EU. Citizenship therefore constitutes deeply “contested terrain,” and, as some observers have already noted, the case for or against the emergence of a EU-European citizenship appears to stand or fall with the respective analyst’s own take on European integration, namely, either as a supra-national (federalization) or a national (intergovernmental) dynamic. The paper advances the citizenship debate by actually circumventing its central supra-national/national framing in European integration analysis. Instead, the contribution will present and defend the idea of citizenship as the historical-normative and political-economic missing link in the present debates about European integration and the future of the EU. As such, the idea of citizenship connects elements of a historical political-sociological, legal theory, and political economy analysis of the EU and European integration into a powerful answer to the question of a European identity; an answer that transcends the all-too-common essentialism of a “European identity” by reframing the issue as a post-national democratic project of political identity-formation. In particular, the present contribution wishes to advance two propositions, namely, that the idea of citizenship presents a) an aspirational norm that expresses Europeanization as a future-oriented project of constructing a new European identity-space based on a conscious reaction against a divisive, violent past; and b) a critique of and challenge to the EU’s present institutional reality as a capitalist democracy. As will be seen, the present situation of citizenship in the EU can be defined as norms, rules, and practices that are expressions of three not easily reconciled, if indeed overlapping dimensions: cosmopolitan aspirations, national state-defined sovereignty, and the demands and restrictions of a regionally integrated capitalist market economy, which is itself part of a global capitalist market. The normative spillover effect of citizenship thereby continues to be checked by two institutional realities: citizenship as an expression of national belonging (a “people”) and the existence of the EU as a capitalist democracy. While the former can be said to be susceptible to a critical reconstruction and various political and cultural initiatives over time (creating identity-formation through shared experiences), it is the latter that can be said to present the contemporary and critical stumbling block. As a capitalist democracy, the EU cannot help but alienate the vast majority of EU-area citizens by actually turning them back into subjects bereft of rights and voice in the context of both regional and global capitalist market forces. This disenfranchising process, in turn, drives those EU-area citizens back into the arms of the (assumed) political security of the national state as their respective democratic “homes,” thereby undermining both EU and European integration. The paper concludes that the emergence of a European citizenship is not a (by-) product of European integration after Word War II, but presents a critical legacy of European divisions and conflicts and as such the political answer to the question of a European identity. Yet in order to advance and secure that historical legacy, it will be necessary to challenge and transform the present institutional confines of the EU as a capitalist democracy. The future of citizenship in this sense depends on a different EU, namely, the EU’s own future as a decidedly democratic project. To what extent this future might come to pass remains to be seen.

Back to top

Conference registration / directions

All are welcome. The format of the conference is that everyone reads the papers in advance. The first discussant spends about five minutes summarizing the paper's main arguments and posing one or two questions. The second discussant spends the next five or so minutes offering suggestions and also posing questions. The author responds for at most five minutes, leaving fifteen minutes for general discussion. We stop promptly after thirty minutes and move on to the next paper.

To register, please contact euce@yorku.ca

Directions:

York University Glendon campus, 2275 Bayview Ave, Toronto: http://www.glendon.yorku.ca/english/directions/direction.html

venue: York Hall room 317 (Senior Common Room)