Making Sense of the New Geography of Citizenship: Fragmented Citizenship in the European Union

Abstract

Citizenship in the supranational realm of the EU became part of our knowledge along three visible dimensions, namely, as (1) a political concept during the Maastricht debates, (2) a policy in the Bulletin of the Communities in 1993 and as (3) a legal concept in Article 8 EC Treaty. This article contends that this naming of citizenship brought new and unintended questions about citizenship to the fore. citizenship does not grant full to democratic participation or representation and it is granted on the basis of Member State nationality, not nationality. That is, specific political and socio-cultural dimensions seem to be lacking. Beyond the political and organizational aspects, these observations raise questions about the community of belonging and more specifically, about how to define borders of belonging. Who has a legitimate right to belong legally to this has become a much debated issue. This article examines the emergence of Union citizenship. It assumes that a focus on the making of citizenship in its historical setting will reveal hidden meanings of the concept. Underlying this analysis is the observation that citizenship became part of the EC/EU political discourse in the early 1970s. Since then, policymaking towards citizenship has unfolded on the basis of two policy packages which entailed the policy objectives of special rights for Community citizens and a passport union. Both touch crucial aspects of modern citizenship, such as borders and how to cross them (passport union) and citizens' right to vote and stand for elections (special rights). They were central to the debates over citizenship, identity, and political union that took place over two decades in the Euro-polity. As the article demonstrates, the step-by-step development and application of the two policy packages not only provides an insight into how citizenship eventually turned into Article 8 EC Treaty 20 years later; it also suggests that citizenship acquires a specific - contextualised - meaning. Citizenship is defined as the dynamic concept of European citizenship practice.