10.1023/A:1010687602603

Abstract

Union citizenship, first introduced in the Maastricht Treaty, confers a broad range of rights on national of the member states, including rights of movement, political rights, protection in non-EU states, and rights to petition. The relationship to national citizenship was clarified in the Treaty of Amsterdam: Union is meant to supplement, not supplant, national citizenship. The Union Charter of Fundamental Rights, signed and proclaimed in Nice December 2000, laid out the range of civil, political, economic and social rights conferred both to Union Citizens and other persons resident in the EU. Even after these multiple rounds of clarification, Union citizenship raises important questions, opportunities and challenges regarding the future development of the Union. Indeed, the significance of Union citizenship itself is contested: If Union citizenship the answer, what is the question? Many see Union citizenship as an instrument for creating a 'soul', a shared feeling of belonging to Others, perhaps rightly fearing the excesses of nation building on soil of yore, insist that Union citizenship is and must remain a purely legal and constitutional conception. Union citizenship must on such views provide and give expression to a common identity, while avoiding the problematic risks of ethnic xenophobia and cultural homogeneity.The contributions to this special issue of Law and Philosophy explore the plausibility and preconditions of various conceptions of Union citizenship, regarded as a response to the need to foster stability, attachment and direction to the political order. Several papers were first discussed at the Roundtable on European Citizenship at the World Congress of Philosophy, Boston 1998 1 . Percy Lehning develops an account of citizenship within a contractarian theory of federalism. Federations are assessed as based on an overlapping consensus among democratic federal partners regarding the terms of their political association. In the EU, citizens' rights and identity are not solely based on their status as members of separate member states, but also as citizens of the Union, perceived as a democratic political union. The political theory of John Rawls identifies a plausible liberal democratic conception of citizenship that offers a strategy for developing a shared citizenship identity. On this basis, Lehning identifies several flaws in the present institutions of the EU and in the political culture. A civil society is crucial for providing the social capital necessary for cohesion in a multicultural, trans-national federal order. Moreover, a social Europe and institutions likely to foster the requisite common identity are required. As of yet, these are insufficiently developed.Jos de Beus argues that a quasi-national conception of identity is conducive to the rise of a democratic political union of Europe. He seeks to resolve the alleged tensions between liberal universalism and communitarian particularism. A shared