New agendas? Culture and citizenship in EU policy

Abstract

If the liberal tradition considered citizenship mostly as a legal status entailing both rights and duties, opposing views from communitarian or republican theorists privilege its substantive dimensions. Social equality is no longer configured exclusively in terms of material redistribution, they argue, but also through the recognition of cultural difference. Whether related to cultural identity or the empowerment of public agency, citizenship is increasingly couched in cultural terms. Taking recourse to political theory, this paper analyses the connections between culture and citizenship in policy documents by the European Union (EU). It identifies three ‘semantic clusters’, which it discusses in more detail: the ontological, the intercultural and the participatory. If the first harnesses culture to address the EU’s ‘legitimacy deficit’ by promoting a European demos, the second shows how these are complemented with new policy concerns emerging in the context of transnational migration. The third in turn focuses on culture as a platform for citizens’ agency through participation in political and deliberative processes.