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European Citizenship

Selected e-articles

Abstract: Since 2019, the European Commission has had a vice president for ‘promoting our European way of life’, but whether a European ‘we’ exists at all is disputed. This article investigates whether and how the Commission has constructed this ‘we’ through narratives of peoplehood. Analysing official communications in migration and citizenship policy between 2007 and 2020, it traces three narrative elements: characters, plot and main theme.  (…)

Abstract:  This Article sheds new light on one of the longest-running debates in the European Union (EU) citizenship literature: the concept of ‘reverse discrimination’ and the question of whether it is justified. Reverse discrimination has divided EU lawyers into roughly two distinct groups. One group believes that it constitutes an unjustified violation of the principle of equality; a second that it is inevitable in a Union governed by the constitutional principle of divided powers. This Article questions this by offering a typology of reverse discrimination. While most scholars assume that reverse discrimination is a singular phenomenon that demands a singular response, this Article shows that it is a variegated phenomenon that demands a variegated response. It distinguishes three types of reverse discrimination and explains that the proper response depends on the type we are considering. Type I is caused by the application of the principle of mutual recognition; Type II by an interaction between domestic federalism and internal discrimination; and Type III by the CJEU’s confusion over the aim of the right to free movement and residence. Through this typology, the Article shows that reverse discrimination is never a corollary of the principle of divided powers, nor is it always incompatible with the principle of equality. Finally, the Article shows that to the extent that reverse discrimination violates the principle of equality, the solution is not to equalise rights upwards but downwards to the lower (national or regional) level of government. This shows that the principle of equality and the principle of divided powers need not collide.

Abstract: Building on recent EU case law, which underlines that a commitment to solidarity in the European context produces concrete legal obligations, this paper highlights that solidarity has procedural as well as normative and substantive dimensions. It then explores the potential of procedural solidarity in the context of Union citizenship and, more specifically, the free movement of Union citizens. The overall objective is to consider if the conception of solidarity as a procedural obligation under EU law can provide fresh ways to think about persisting challenges around freedom of movement. Procedural solidarity emphasises the fair sharing of responsibility, including financial responsibility, when implementing EU objectives and the taking of decisions collectively, respecting the general requirements of EU law. Fundamentally, while adherence to procedural solidarity might not produce significantly different outcomes in contested areas of EU citizenship law, it would strengthen the decision-making processes that deliver those outcomes, cultivating, in turn, better accountability for the choices made by both EU and national institutions.

Abstract: The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights has reinvigorated the debate on the role that the European Union can exercise in the sphere of subjective rights. Such debate has traditionally focused on the limits of the current social acquis, considered unable to create fully-fledged European social citizenship, that ultimately remains limited to the right to reside and freely move within the EU and enjoy social rights as nationals. Conversely, this article argues that the gradual expansion of the EU’s social acquis has slowly but clearly started to disconnect social rights from their exclusive national foundations, leading to the emergence of a new marble cake pattern of right production, which to a large extent reproduces the trajectory of federal polities. To capture this development, this article proposes an original analytical framework to dissect the notion of social rights as bundles of power resources (normative, instrumental and enforcement), which enable individuals to claim and actually receive material benefits in order to cope with a codified array of risks and needs. By shifting the attention from the formal dimension (laws and their enforcement) to its concrete practice (access and outputs), our conception connects the concept of social citizenship more directly to what ultimately matters for life chances (individualised material benefits) as well as for the social and political bonds of a community (the rights-based claim and experience of social protection). In so doing, we move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as the only producer of social entitlements and are able to appreciate the increasing relevance of the European Union as a provider of power resources and guarantor of policy outputs.

Abstract: European citizenship consisting of equal economic, social and political rights for all EU citizens has come under pressure in recent years due to the different crises the EU had to face. Based on a survey conducted in 13 EU member states we examined to what extent EU citizens support the notion that citizens from other European countries should enjoy the same rights as nationals. Overall, 56% of EU citizens support the idea that citizens from other EU member states (EU migrants) and national citizens shall be treated equally. In addition, we find remarkable variation between the countries. Multivariate analyses indicate that cultural factors on the individual and the country level have a strong impact on attitudes towards Europeanized equality, whereas structural factors that are related to individuals’ and a countries’ socioeconomic position are only of minor importance.

Abstract : The case law of the Court of Justice on the prohibition of general (meta)data retention and on the right to be forgotten, has formed the cradle for a new status protecting and empowering the data subject. Built upon a distinctive equilibrium of values and linked to the territory of the Union, the new status can be described as an embryonic European digital citizenship. The article explores the construction of the new status orchestrated by the Court of Justice in close interplay with national courts (especially apex courts) and the EU legislature. It identifies various ways in which the case law of the ECJ on digital rights is similar to the case law on Union citizenship. The emerging status then opens up a new vista of how citizenship can be understood and developed in the EU legal order beyond the framework of Articles 20 and 21 TFEU, in order to address the challenges of an increasingly digitized society.

Abstract: In this work, we focus on the idea of identity strictly linked to the idea of citizenship. It is the subject of a profound revision and an innovative proposal. Due to globalisation, global citizenship and global identity are currently the object of an attempt at a profound re-elaboration in light of the new contemporary scenarios globalisation has generated. This study provides a reading of and an important step toward cosmopolitan sociology as a paradigm, methodology, and working style, although it still implies the fight against zombie concepts - 'culture' and 'identity', according to Beck - replaced, for instance, by memetics and evolutionary contingency. We propose the critical concept of European citizenship, open to the idea of a European political and cultural space, where we seek to identify, at least roughly, the object, the spatial continuum, and the subjective profiles of an evolving identity, the European identity, until an elaborate attempt at innovation. Our starting point is the growing awareness that the ideas of world citizenship and European citizenship constitute the most desirable solution. It is not free from problematic elements, which, from our point of view, belong to three sets of issues that we have identified as the focus of this research.

Abstract: The topic of citizenship education and the promotion of democratic citizenship in schools has risen to the top of educational policy agendas in Europe over the past three decades. This rise in attention, however, appears to be accompanied by an apparent lack of attention to the specific manner in which citizenship, education and the assumed relationship between both are currently conceptualised and understood in this policy context. The currently dominant notions of citizenship education centre around a concept of citizenship-as-competence, illustrating a certain assumption of equivalence between citizenship and formal education in schools, without further elaborating on this assumption. By means of a critical re-reading of key European educational policy texts referring to citizenship education, and their use of the key concepts of citizenship and education, our analysis shows how the competence-based approach to citizenship education in European educational policymaking entails tensions with its own assumptions, therefore falling short of its own proclaimed purpose of emancipating young people in Europe to become autonomous, engaged and critical democratic citizens.

Abstract: The relationship between EU citizenship and nationality is still defined by 'linkage' and 'derivation': national citizenship enjoys primacy over and conditions access to EU citizenship. However, because naturalisation decisions have a European dimension as well as a cross-border dimension, various commentators have questioned whether this primacy is desirable. This article examines alternative models of EU citizenship and argues that the answer is not to reconsider the criteria of 'linkage' and 'derivation', but to create some common EU rules on 'access' to national and EU citizenship. A particularly attractive solution is for rules on the grant of nationality to be guided by the idea of a 'genuine link'. Reflecting on the Commission's recent report on investment citizenship within the EU and the debate it provoked, this article questions whether such shared rules can currently be adopted.

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