Creating European Citizens

Exploring a key aspect of European integration, this clear and thoughtful book considers the remarkable experiment with common rights and citizenship in the EU. Governments around the world traditionally distinguish insiders (citizens) from outsiders (foreigners). Yet over the past half-century, an extensive set of supranational rights has been created in Europe that removes member governments' authority to privilege their own citizens, a hallmark of sovereignty. The culmination of supranational rights, European citizenship not only provides individuals with choices about where to live and work but also forces governments to respect those choices. Explaining this innovation—why states cede their sovereignty and eradicate or redefine the boundaries of the political community by including "foreigners"—Willem Maas analyzes the development of European citizenship within the larger context of the evolution of rights. Imagining more than simply a free trade market, the goal of building a "broader and deeper community among peoples" with a "destiny henceforward shared"—creating European citizens—has informed European integration since its origins. The author argues that its success or failure will not only determine the future of Europe but will also provide lessons for political integration elsewhere.

Making European Citizens examines the forms of transnational citizenship developing in Europe. Active citizenship involves more than simply voting. Achieving mobilization at a transnational level may involve new democratic techniques and skills. The volume explores how far European citizens have acquired the requisite methods and qualities.

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.

Although great efforts have been made to understand citizenship, it has remained a contested concept, largely because of the problem of the changing relationship between citizens and their community of membership or belonging. The European Union poses the most recent and dramatic change to this definition of citizenship. Arguing that citizenship must be explored from a perspective that takes this continual change into account, Antje Wiener develops the concept of citizenship practice; the process of policymaking and/or political participation which contributes to creating the terms of citizenship. The approach draws on both comparative social, historical literature on the state and the new historical institutionalism in European integration theories. “European” Citizenship Practice advances a discursive analysis of citizenship practice based on these related bodies of literature, which lie at the heart of this important contribution to citizenship studies.

In many ways, education mirrors society by reflecting changing and emergent goals and values as well as by contributing to both the reproduction and production of particular life forms. In the context of the formative project «Europe, » education is called upon to play an increasingly central role, one that is responsive to particular images of the European Union and to its aspirations and goals. The widespread conviction is that education and training will re-invigorate ailing economies, and that, in the context of globalization, national and regional competitiveness will only prevail if there is a qualitative continued improvement in human capital. This volume critically examines such claims, considering the ways in which learning is being constructed across Europe and the implications this has for notions of democratic citizenship and education.

25 years after the introduction of EU citizenship this book reconsiders its contradictions and constraints as well as promises and prospects. Analyzing a disputed concept and evaluating its implementation and social effects Reconsidering EU Citizenship contributes to the lively debate on European and transnational citizenship. It offers new insights for the ongoing theoretical debates on the future of EU citizenship – a future that will be determined by the transformative path the EU is going to take vis à vis the centrifugal forces of the current economic and political crisis.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This Open Access book investigates European citizenship after Brexit, in light of the functionalist theory of citizenship. No matter its shape, Brexit will impact significantly on what has been labelled as one of the major achievements of EU integration: Citizenship of the Union. For the first time an automatic and collective lapse of status is observed. It is a form of involuntary loss of citizenship en masse, imposed by the automatic workings of the law on EU citizens of exclusively British nationality. It does not however create statelessness and it is likely to be tolerated under international law. This loss of citizenship is connected to a reduction of rights, affecting not solely the former Union citizens but also second country nationals in the United Kingdom and their family members. The status of European citizenship and connected rights are first presented. Chapter Two focuses on the legal uncertainty that afflicts second country nationals in the United Kingdom as well as British citizens, turning from expats to post-European third country nationals. Chapter Three describes the functionalist theory and delineates three ways in which it applies to Brexit. These three directions of inquiry are developed in the following chapters. Chapter Four focuses on the intension of Union citizenship: Which rights can be frozen? Chapter Five determines the extension of Union citizenship: Who gets to withdraw the status? The key finding is that while Member states are in principle free to revoke the status of Union citizen, former Member states are not unbounded in stripping Union citizens of their acquired territorial rights. Conclusions are drawn and policy-suggestions summed up in the final chapter.