Citizenship within the European Union
The European Union (EU) is concerned about equalisation and redistributive social
policies. Richard Bellamy and Alex Warleigh’s edited Citizenship and Governance
in the European Union(2001) sees the EU and its concept of citizenship as a paradox
and a puzzle. Is the EU seeking to establish a new kind of political entity or is it
simply another (and larger) version of a state? The EU, this volume argues, has two
aspects: one is the market, the other is democracy. Neo-liberals may think of the
two as synonymous, but that view is not shared by the contributors to this volume,
who point out that citizenship is a political issue which necessarily transcends a
market identity.
The argument advanced is that while the current rights of the EU citizen may at
present seem somewhat limited, we should be concerned with unanticipated
outcomes. Under the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, European citizens have
the right to stand and vote in local and European parliamentary elections even if
they are not nationals in the states where they reside; they can petition the
Ombudsman as well as the European Parliament, and they are entitled to diplomatic
protection in third states where one’s ‘own’ state is not represented (Bellamy and
Warleigh, 2001: 23).
To be sure, the EU was initially conceived as a transnational capitalist society,
an economic union that was a free trade area. It could, however, be argued that
people like Jean Monnet had explicitly political objectives right from the start. There
is a logic to the EU that extends beyond the purely economic. It may well have
been (for example) the intentionof EU founders to confine sexual equality to the
notion of a level playing field constituted by the cost of factors of production, but
economic rights require a political and social context to be meaningful. It is the
potential of EU citizenship that is important. It is this which links a rather passive,
state-centred notion to a much more ‘active, democratic citizenship’ (Bellamy and
Warleigh, 2001: 117), a move from a politics of identity – which implies a rather
repressive homogeneity – to a politics of affinity which recognises and respects
difference.
Citizenship is a ‘surprisingly elusive concept’ (Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001: 143),
and the concept is an excellent example of an idea which compels us to think the
unthinkable. Indeed, the very notion of citizenship was introduced as an attempt
to overcome the ‘democratic deficit’ – to combat the view that the EU is an alien
body and that only nation-states really matter. Undoubtedly there is a ‘dualism’ at
the heart of the concept of EU citizenship. On the one hand, the term is tied to
states and markets. On the other hand, the European Court of Justice has interpreted
the question of freedom of movement in broad social terms, as a quasi-constitutional
entitlement, and not simply as a direct economic imperative. Thus, to take an
example, the right to freedom of movement is linked to the right not to be
discriminated against by comparison with host-state nationals (Bellamy and
Warleigh, 2001: 96).
Bellamy and Warleigh (and those who contribute to their volume) acknowledge
that current rights of EU citizens are limited, but their point is that once the notion
of citizenship is established, the anomaly of confining political rights to those who
are already citizens of member states becomes plain. Already, limited rights – likeChapter 6 Citizenship 131