Enacting European Citizenship

What does it mean to be a European citizen? The rapidly changing politics of citizenship in the face of migration, diversity, heightened concerns about security and financial and economic crises, has left European citizenship as one of the major political and social challenges to European integration. Enacting European Citizenship develops a distinctive perspective on European citizenship and its impact on European integration by focusing on 'acts' of European citizenship. The authors examine a broad range of cases - including those of the Roma, Sinti, Kurds, sex workers, youth and other 'minorities' or marginalised peoples - to illuminate the ways in which the institutions and practices of European citizenship can hinder as well as enable claims for justice, rights and equality. This book draws the key themes together to explore what the limitations and possibilities of European citizenship might be.

This 10-hour free course explored a way of thinking about European citizenship that need not be limited to existing citizens of the EU.

This book examines the changing character of European citizenship, focusing on 'acts' of citizenship.

The Stockholm Programme and the European Commission's Action Plan implementing it have positioned the freedom, security and justice of 'European citizens' at the heart of the EU's political agenda for the next five years. Yet, who are the 'citizens' about whom the Council and the European Commission are so interested? At first sight it would appear as if only those individuals holding the nationality of a member state would fall within this category. This paper challenges this assumption, however, and argues that as a consequence of litigation by individuals before EU courts and of the growing importance given to the act of mobility in citizenship and immigration law, the personal scope of the freedoms accorded to European citizenship already covers certain categories of thirdcountry nationals (TCNs). Through an examination of selected landmark rulings of the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the paper demonstrates how the requirement of being a national of an EU member state is progressively becoming less important when defining the boundaries of the European citizenry. TCNs already enjoy and benefit from a number of European citizenship-related and citizenship-like freedoms, rights, benefits and general principles, which are subject to protection and scrutiny at the EU level. This development, we argue, is not only an indication of a continuing loss of discretionary power by the nation-state with respect to European citizenship, but may also constitute a clear signal that a new European citizenship of TCNs is in the making in the Union. This citizenship places the freedom to move and non-discrimination on the basis of nationality at the core of its identity.

This book examines the electoral rights granted to those who do not have the nationality of the state in which they reside, within the European Union and its Member States. It looks at the rights of EU citizens to vote and stand in European Parliament elections and local elections wherever they live in the EU, and at cases where Member States of the Union also choose to grant electoral rights to other non-nationals from countries outside the EU. The EU's electoral rights are among the most important rights first granted to EU citizens by the EU Treaties in the 1990s. Putting these rights into their broader context, the book provides important insights into the development of the EU now that the Constitutional Treaty has been rejected in the referendums in France and the Netherlands, and into issues which are still sensitive for national sovereignty such as immigration, nationality and naturalization.

This book identifies, analyses and compares a variety of possible ‘barriers’ to the exercise of European citizenship and discusses ways to move beyond these barriers. It contributes in a multi-disciplinary way to a highly topical issue and offers new perspectives on EU citizenship in the sense that it critically analyses concepts of citizenship, the way EU citizenship is politically, legally and socially institutionalized, and elaborates alternatives to the current paths of realizing EU citizenship.

Lineages of European Citizenship provides an historical analysis of the development of citizenship from the nineteenth to the Twentieth-century in Europe and the USA. The contributors focus on the role played by internal struggles for social and political inclusion in shaping the character of both the state and citizenship, and the deployment of two main political languages, loosely associated with liberalism and republicanism, in legitimizing citizens' claims.

Civil, economic, political and social rights are at the centre of the concept of European citizenship. In this volume, the focus is on the political-constitutional dimension of European citizen­ship, which is discussed from the perspective of several disciplines – history, constitutional law and political science. It provides a multi-faceted account of the evolution of European citizenship and its institutionalization, explaining why certain rights came into existence at a certain time and focussing on several key actors involved, such as the European Court of Justice.

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.