Challenging European Citizenship

This book provides a critique of the way in which European citizenship is imagined and practiced. Setting their analysis in its full historical context, the authors challenge preconceived ideas about European citizenship on the basis of a detailed reconstruction of political, social and economic practice. In particular, they show the extent to which the elimination of formal internal borders within Europe has come hand in glove with the emergence of new socio-economic boundaries and the hardening of external borders. The book concludes with a number of concrete proposals to forge a genuinely post-national form of membership.

European citizenship is facing numerous challenges, including fundamental rights and social justice considerations. These get amplified in the context of Brexit and the general rise of populism in Europe today. This book takes a representative selection of these challenges, which raise a multitude of highly complex issues, as an invitation to provide a critical appraisal of the current state of the EU legal framework surrounding EU citizenship. The contributions are grouped in four parts, dealing with constitutional developments posing challenges to EU citizenship; the limits of the free movement paradigm in the context of EU citizenship; EU citizenship beyond free movement; and, lastly, EU citizenship in the context of the outside world, including Brexit, the EEA and Eurasian Economic Union.

This Research Handbook provides a panoramic guide to the study and research of EU citizenship and its development within a challenging environment characterised by restrictive access to social benefits, Brexit, Euroscepticism and Covid-19. It combines theoretical perspectives with analyses of both the existing and future rights, duties and social protection that EU citizens ought to enjoy in a democratic and principled European Union.

The process of European integration has had a marked influence on the nature and meaning of citizenship in national and post-national contexts as well as on the definition and exercise of civil rights across Member States. This original edited collection brings together insights from EU law, human rights and comparative constitutional law to address this underexplored nexus.Split into two distinct thematic parts, it first evaluates relevant frameworks of civil rights protection, with special attention on enforcement mechanisms and the role of civil society organisations. Next, it engages extensively with a series of individual rights connected to EU citizenship. Comprising detailed studies on access to nationality, the right to free movement, non-discrimination, family life, data protection and the freedom of expression, this book maps the expanding role of European law in the national sphere. It identifies a number of challenges to core civil rights that the current supranational framework is at pains to address. The contributors suggest and develop several new ideas on how to take the EU integration project forward. Civil Rights and EU Citizenship provides an innovative perspective on both the conceptual dimensions and the actual realities of rights-based citizenship which will be of interest to legal scholars, practitioners and policy-makers alike.

While the European integration project is facing new challenges, abandonments and criticism, it is often forgotten that there are powerful legal instruments that allow citizens to protect and extend their rights. These instruments and the actions taken to activate them are often overlooked and deliberately ignored in the mainstream debates. This book presents a selection of cases in which legal institutions, social movements, avant-gardes and minorities have tried, and often succeeded, to enhance the current state of human rights through traditional as well as innovative actions. The chapters of this book investigate some of the cases in which the gap between the conventionally recognized rights and those advocated is becoming wider and where traditionally disadvantaged groups raise new problems or new issues are emerging concerning individual freedom, transparency and accountability, which are not yet properly addressed in the current political and legal landscape. Can political institutions and courts without coercive power of last resort actually foster more progressive rights? This book suggests that the expansion of human rights might be a viable strategy to generate a proper European citizenship. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Law and Society, Sociology and Migration Studies and more broadly to NGOs and policy advisers.

In Supranational Citizenship and the Challenge of Diversity Francesca Strumia explores the potential of European citizenship as a legal construct, and as a marker of group boundaries, for filtering internal and external diversities in the European Union. Adopting comparative federalism methodology, and drawing on insights from the international relations literature on the diffusion of norms, the author questions the impact of European citizenship on insider/outsider divides in the EU, as experienced by immigrants, set by member states and perceived by “native” citizens. The book proposes a novel argument about supranational citizenship as mutual recognition of belonging. This argument has important implications for the constitution of insider/outsider divides and for the reconciliation of multiple levels of diversity in the EU.

This book maps out, from a variety of theoretical standpoints, the challenges generated by European integration and EU citizenship for community membership, belonging and polity-making beyond the state. It does so by focusing on three main issues of relevance for how EU citizenship has developed and its capacity to challenge state sovereignty and authority as the main loci of creating and delivering rights and protection. First, it looks at the relationship between citizenship of the Union and European identity and assesses how immigration and access to nationality in the Member States impact on the development of a common European identity. Secondly, it discusses how the idea of solidarity interacts with the boundaries of EU citizenship as constructed by the entitlement and capacity of mobile citizens to enjoy equality and social rights as EU citizens. Thirdly, the book engages with issues of EU citizenship and equality as the building blocks of the EU project. By engaging with these themes, this volume provides a topical and comprehensive account of the present and future development of Union citizenship and studies the collisions between the realisation of its constructive potential and Member State autonomy.

In EU Citizenship, Nationality and Migrant Status: An Ongoing Challenge, Kristīne Krūma offers an account of the regulation of nationality at international, EU and national (Latvian) levels. Growing global migration and multiple individual loyalties lead to a fusion of national identities traditionally preserved by the EU Member States. Dismantling national borders and granting directly effective rights to EU citizens broadens our understanding about belonging only to the limited territory of a single State. The primary focus is the status of the EU citizenship, which has become a meaningful status capable of satisfying claims by citizens. The Latvian example shows that migrant status cannot be ignored because of the crucial role of migrants in the future construct of the EU.