EU Citizenship: A Tool for Integration?

Abstract

European Union citizenship conveys important rights and opportunities to the almost 450 million citizens of EU Member States. European citizens are first and foremost citizens of their respective member states, but EU citizenship is designed to complement national citizenship, enabling individuals to move and live across the EU, participate in the political life of the EU, and exercise meaningful rights (e.g., diplomatic and consular protection in third countries). For instance, EU citizenship enables participation in local elections of an individual’s their country of residence (independent of national citizenship), as well as vote for members of the European Parliament. Voting in these types of elections promises to increase the political legitimacy of the EU and, in principle, diminish the democratic deficit of this supranational institution. And through political participation that builds political legitimacy, EU citizens push this institution toward an “ever closer Union.”

1 Introduction

European Union citizenship conveys important rights and opportunities to the almost 450 million citizens of EU Member States. European citizens are first and foremost citizens of their respective member states, but EU citizenship is designed to complement national citizenship, enabling individuals to move and live across the EU, participate in the political life of the EU, and exercise meaningful rights (e.g., diplomatic and consular protection in third countries). For instance, EU citizenship enables participation in local elections of an individual’s their country of residence (independent of national citizenship), as well as vote for members of the European Parliament. Voting in these types of elections promises to increase the political legitimacy of the EU and, in principle, diminish the democratic deficit of this supranational institution. And through political participation that builds political legitimacy, EU citizens push this institution toward an “ever closer Union.”

This is the aspirational view of citizenship—that citizenship is a vehicle for political integration. In practice, EU citizenship constitutes a rather idiosyncratic if uncertain role in the EU—Maarten Vink (2004, 25) even labels it “political kitsch”. Electoral participation exhibits high variance across the member states and identification with “European identity” is weak, where the identity itself is described as “banal” (McNamara, 2015). In fact, in voting to “Brexit”, a slim majority of British citizens expressed a willingness to forego EU benefits altogether, which they now experience in their deprivation of rights like free movement. And, most problematic, EU citizenship is deeply stratified, unequally experienced across individuals in the member states when it comes to family reunification, social rights and expulsion (Mantu et al., 2020). Can EU citizenship be a mechanism of incorporation given these problems? Can EU citizenship compensate for political and social integration gaps created at national or subnational levels, detailed in previous chapters of this volume?

This chapter stands distinct in this volume in that it considers the nexus of citizenship and integration from a supernational perspective. A book claiming to re-examine the citizenship and integration nexus in Europe would simply be incomplete if it did not consider the layering of rights conveyed through supranational status. In studying the evolution and consequences of EU citizenship, I detail what kind of political integration is produced for the individual. I describe meaningful rights gained through EU citizenship, from mobility to social rights, and the ways in which these fill gaps in integration, particularly at the subnational level. In this analysis, this chapter also departs from previous chapters in taking a structural perspective, focusing not on the experiences of citizenship or individual-level observations but on policy as institutional opportunity structures.

This chapter also considers what I call reflective consequences: what the evolution and limitations of EU citizenship mean for the EU as a political organization. In other words, it simultaneously considers both directions: the consequences of EU citizenship for receiving individuals and the EU as the conferring regional organization. Initially, a shared community status – which would eventually be described by the term “citizen” – this European-wide status was designed to address the challenges of labor mobility in a shared economic area. It later evolved into an instrument for conferring social and political rights in a political union, establishing bonds of affinity and reducing the democratic deficit. In tracing changes in EU citizenship policy in this evolving regional organization, I show how the goalposts shift from economic to social to political rationales. Today, I argue, EU citizenship is incomplete as a democratic mechanism for conveying rights, imbalanced in acquisition rules across the member states, and inconsistent in establishing how EU political rights are practiced across member states. I illustrate the consequences of these “underdevelopments” in three critical policy areas, including Enlargement, national citizenship eligibility, and Brexit. To conclude, I argue that while EU citizenship yields some important short-term gains for individual integration – namely mobility and rights – there are long-term limitations to relying on EU citizenship to bridge the integration-citizenship gap. Moreover, an unevenly practiced EU citizenship raises some serious consequences for thinking about EU political authority and democratic legitimacy.

2 What Is EU Citizenship?

Like traditional qua national citizenship, EU citizenship is a status, a set of rights, and an identity. As a status, it permits individuals access to a burgundy-colored passport, intra-Union mobility, right to residence and myriad economic, civil and social rights. Those include the right to vote and run as a candidate in municipal and European Parliament elections in the member state of residence; the right to petition Parliament, access documents, and appeal to the Ombudsman; diplomatic and consular protection and services in third countries, the right to address EU institutions in your language of choice; and, generally, the legal protection of EU law, from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to a variety of regulations and directives, like data privacy. Finally, it is an identity, though not a beloved¹ nor equally shared one (Matthijs & Merler, 2020), promoted through a common passport, flag, anthem, currency, and history. Any number of public opinion polls will illustrate how widely different the EU is valued across the member states (De Vries, 2018).

But citizenship is more than an individual status and identity—who is a national and what that person receives. Citizenship is fundamentally a transactional relationship between an individual and a state (Tilly, 1997). As part of this transaction, individuals get rights from the polity, but they also owe certain obligations. In exchange, the state has certain obligations to it’s citizens but also claims rights. It is reciprocal in the truest sense. An individual requires citizenship for rights and protection, and a state requires citizenship, too, to delineate national boundaries and establish a constituency for administration (e.g., Weber, 1976) and, in democratic contexts, from who it derives its legitimacy (1959). While these understandings of citizenship tie an individual to a national state, there is nothing that limits the application of this concept to other types of polities, both above (international organizations) and below (subnational, city-state units). To wit, the codification of EU citizenship at Maastricht was referred to as a “constitutional moment” (Ackerman 1991, cited in Maas, 2007), not only meant to empower the individual through status but solidify the connection and legitimacy between EU institutions and its citizens.

Yet, because EU citizenship is a derivative of state assent—as the Treaty of Lisbon clarifies, “Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship” – it only exists for individuals as moderated by and filtered through the member states. Simply put, this weakens the nature of the transactional tie. What do EU citizens get from and owe the EU, what does the EU owe and get from its citizens? First amended in the Amsterdam Treaty, and to pacify Danish opposition expressed in their failed Maastricht referendum, the language makes clear that EU citizenship is not a dual citizenship, but a subsidiary one.

During the heyday of European integration, many scholars were enthusiastic about the theoretical possibilities of post- or transnational citizenship (e.g., Soysal, 1994). Rainer Bauböck (1995), for instance, saw national citizenship as becoming a source of transnational citizenship and rights. David Jacobson (1997), on the other hand, expressed some concerns that postnational citizenship elevated a series of problems for international relations but celebrated the institiuationalization of human rights. Peter Schuck (1998), an American legal scholar, worried the trend devalued citizenship overall. But as EU integration marched on, and following a series of Treaty disappointments, from Amsterdam revisions to constitutional amendments, citizenship ultimately remained territorialized and complementary to national citizenship, part of a multilevel citizenship construction and not meant to be interchangeable (Bauböck, 2014).

3 The Evolution of an Incomplete, Imbalanced, and Inconsistent Citizenship

That EU citizenship is limited is not a novel observation.² But what are the consequences of this limited status? We can look at limited citizenship as a function of institutional design, namely the interchangeable assertiveness and restraint of the European Court of Justice (e.g. Kochenov, 2017) as well as member state preferences, in line with liberal intergovernmental accounts (Moravcsik, 1993).

“Limited by design” is not inherently problematic. Many have argued that its underdeveloped identity is purposeful, forwarding democratic defenses of the derivative nature of EU citizenship (Nicolaïdis, 2013; Bellamy, 2008). And no one would mistake EU citizenship as anything resembling a coherent identity, given the enduring variation in national practice, differences in status, and absence of collected social rights (e.g., collective protection against financial risk) (Weale, 2014). Moreover, group-making and identity formation is an ongoing process with no set endpoint or objective. When compared to other fledging forms generated by other regional unions, such as those in South and Central American or in sub-Saharan Africa, EU citizenship is the most advanced model of supranational citizenship (Maas, 2014, 409). But there are consequences, and it is a valuable exercise to hold up the image of what EU citizenship is supposed to be and do to what we can empirically observe.

According to Article 10 of the Treaty on European Union: “every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union.” Moreover, citizenship establishes a clear democratic mandate for EU institutions: “decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen” and “political parties at the European level contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of citizens of the Union”. This establishes a benchmark for measuring the extent to which this ideal is obtained, where citizenship falls short, and what the policy consequences are of the gap in-between.

To assess the extent to which EU citizenship has reached this benchmark, we start at the beginning and trace the policy evolution itself. The story of EU citizenship is one of changing the goalpost, interest players (i.e., member states), and interests. As a result of these ongoing and changing dynamics, as new interests are introduced, others stall. Thus, we first detail a longitudinal account of how citizenship evolves to be incomplete.

EU citizenship is rooted in the Paris Treaty (1951), which established the European Coal and Steel Community and free movement for workers in those fields. This early establishment of workers’ rights across borders of the member states set into motion a series of decisions that would layer on top of one another, accumulating in the concept of EU Citizenship alongside the codification of the political union at Maastricht in 1992. Indeed, if you search through the early treaty texts, you will not find a single reference to either “citizen” or “citizenship” before the Maastricht Treaty—and even this reference is nestled in a section dedicated to subsidiarity. But the idea of status for member state individuals qua workers takes root early and evolves.

Economic factors were not the sole drivers of this process. Maas (2007, 7) describes “the effort to entrench and expand a set of supranational rights, thereby creating European citizens” as reflecting “the will to create a community of people rather than simply a free market area.” Nor was this progression incidental, or a byproduct of integration elsewhere. As early as the 1960s, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) established that “[The European Economic Community] is more than an agreement which merely creates mutual obligations between the contracting states. This view is confirmed by the preamble to the Treaty which refers not only to governments but to peoples. It is also confirmed more specifically by the establishment of institutions endowed with sovereign rights, the exercise of which affects members states and also their citizens” (quoted in Vink, 2005, 44–5).³

By the 1970s, the goal post started to move. Pushed by Belgium, Italy, and Spain, social policy (attaching social entitlements and rights of residence) appeared on the docket as a measure to protect workers. Yet while idea entrepreneurs were talking about “transform[ing] the free movement rights into an authentic common citizenship,” strong opponents like Denmark and the UK checked these ambitions (Maas, 2007, 42–3). New members at the time (both ascended to EU membership in 1973), this disrupted a consensus among early member states, whose plan was to consolidate social rights in a singular status, merging categories of workers and rights in EU citizenship by incorporating the Social Protocol.

With the Single European Act (1986), which established free movement and flow of labor across intra-EU borders as a bridge to establishing a single market, the goal of EC worker’s status started to change. Having realized one purpose (establish a status for labor mobility) and being effectively circumscribed in its second purpose (extend social rights) by new member states, status cum citizenship became a new tool for reducing the increasing chasm of democratic legitimacy between member state national citizens and EU institutions. As the European Parliament started to grow in prominence and power (Tsebelis, 1994), Eurocrats became concerned with whether EU citizenship could mitigate the sizable democratic deficit (Follesdal & Hix, 2006).

Finally, while Maastricht may have been a “constitutional moment,” the citizenship it produced that was far less ambitious than planned.⁴ On the one hand, states like Spain were pushing “to make a qualitative jump which allows an area of essentially economic character to be transformed into an integrated area which would be at the direct service of the citizen” (Spanish proposal on European citizenship, quoted in Vink, 2001, 882). On the other, European citizenship was met by skepticism by other member states; Danish voters rejected the treaty in a national referendum; Belgian policymakers thought it did not go far enough, but also debated local voting rights (along with France and Luxembourg). Among the strongest of Maastricht supporters were those with citizens working across the EU in large numbers, e.g., Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal. Italy in particular was the largest sending state among the original EC members and the earliest and strongest advocate of free movement of workers. Some of the strongest supporters were also newer member states, who ratified the Treaty as they joined the EU. These views were not as vocal in the negotiation process, as they were not yet members. Thus, as a minimal policy, we can see how “Maastricht achieved less than some had hoped, but more than many had thought possible” (Maas, 2007, 59).

Another consequence of Maastricht is that, in failing to seize on the momentum of Europe’s constitutional moment to “complete” EU citizenship, such as consolidating social rights, there lacked critical political momentum afterwards to move the project forward. Policy innovation after Maastricht can largely be characterized as sclerotic or plateauing. Maastricht took years to ratify across the member states, and Danish intransigence certainly impeded ongoing discussions. In one example, the Treaty of Amsterdam was meant to expand EU citizen rights, but instead, created a variety of policies circling—but not addressing—the issue, like employment and public health, and—as pertains directly to citizenship—only established the right to contact the EU in any language. Much of this was due to British and Danish opposition to elements of Maastricht. In fact, the very absence of rights-pursuing momentum—specifically that of consolidating social rights around a single status—is the source of its own incompleteness: “the attempt to add a veneer of common European rights over well-established national rights based on dissimilar ethical and moral conceptions…helps explain why EU citizenship did not develop faster or more fully, and why it could be weakened or even repealed” (Maas, 2007, 95). Failed referendums in France and the Netherlands on the constitutional Draft Treaty, the challenges of Enlargement, and the politically difficult issue of mass migration ultimately put the breaks on consolidating EU citizenship rights or moving citizenship status forward.⁵ This type of incompleteness was portended by The Tindemans Report of 1975, which argued that “An unfinished structure does not weather well: it must be completed, otherwise it collapses.”⁶ In sum, where EU citizenship establishes meaningful rights, its incompleteness leaves much to be desired. It remains an unfinished tool, providing status (and regularization for migrants of new member states) but unrealized potential in conveying other rights that are instrumental for filling immigrant integration gaps.

A second concern with EU citizenship as a mechanism of integration is its imbalanced application across the member states when it comes to conferring status and rights. Article 20 creates the link between member state and EU citizenship: “every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union.” This primarily excludes permanent residents, i.e., citizens with non-EU citizenship, who may enjoy other rights but can be barred from naturalization, which remains a sovereign prerogative of EU member states and thus from access to EU citizenship. Member states still retain full autonomy for defining naturalization procedures, and the EU has kept an arms-length on this matter, preserving national sovereignty in this area above all (de Groot & Luk, 2014). By member states retaining exclusion national competence in conferring citizenship, two different types of problems are created. First, EU citizenship procedures are not evenly applied across countries. Unlike in other federal systems (Weiler, 1999), EU citizenship has not produced “communitarianism” or even harmonization, and there is wide variation in national citizenship conferring practices (Goodman, 2010). This inconsistency can produce discriminatory practices cross-nationally, and rulings like Tjebbes (Court of Justice, judgment of 12 March 2019, case C-221/17) represent missed opportunities by the ECJ to address unevenness in national legislation (Swider, 2020).

States can use this exclusive right to pursue national priorities that may directly undercut other member states. For example, some member states use membership in the EU to sell citizenship through investor schemes. Countries like Malta profit from selling access to the EU while pushing the issues of immigration onto actual destinations. As member states also have not coordinated on immigration policy, individual member states decide which third country nationals (immigrants from outside of the EU) get access, and thus, begin a path to citizenship (or not). These practices make EU citizenship externally inconsistent, and subject to rife, economic discrimination. For their part, the EP and the Commission have opposed this practice since 2014, initiating infringement procedures against Malta and Cyprus. More recently, in response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, the Commission announced their intention to end investor citizenship schemes of EU member states altogether.

Last, EU citizenship rights as practiced within states are themselves inconsistent. EU law establishes voting (and candidacy) rights for European Parliament elections for non-national EU citizens (also known as second-country nationals, where first country nationals are citizens of their country of residence). It also provides local voting rights for second-country nationals. Yet there is a wide gap between policy and practice across and within member states, with members states exercising significant discretion in interpreting eligibility and access restrictions. Fig. 11.1 presents voting rights for non-national EU citizens (i.e., SCNs), i.e., EU citizens resident in states other than that of their national citizenship, at both the European Parliament (supranational – SN) and local (LO) level. Data is from the GLOBALCIT Electoral Laws (“ELECLAW”) database (2019),⁷ which contains information on a range of issues and parameters of electoral inclusiveness, from voting to candidate rights.⁸ Measures are scaled 0 to 1, where 1 is the most inclusive.

Fig. 11.1

Voting Rights for Second Country Nationals at the Supranational and Local Levels

In principle, voting rights should not vary for EU citizens by country of residence. That they do in practice is evidence not only of unevenness of EU citizenship status across the member states, but incompleteness in harmonizing citizenship practices.⁹ In Fig. 11.1, we see that eligibility and access are basically equal for EU citizens when it comes to supranational elections, i.e., voting in European Parliament elections. Almost all states have a score at or approaching 1 (full inclusion). However, we see real variation when it comes to local voting rights. In addition to variation across states, we also observe democratic rights gaps between local and supranational voting rights within states (e.g., Austria, Poland).

A second type of gap—for the purposes of illustration—is when we compare local voting rights of second country national (SCN)—a right under EU law—to those of third country nationals (TCN), decided according to national discretion. We would expect less equality and inclusivity for TCNs, who lack EU citizenship status. On the other hand, if the argument is a democratic one – that individuals that live within a territory should have say in the rules by which they are governed – then gaps are a little more difficult to justify from a normative perspective.

Figure 11.2 presents degree of access to local voting rights for both EU citizens (SCNs) and non-EU citizens (TCNs).¹⁰ Using the same scale of 0 to 1 (where 1 is the most inclusive), we see clear variation across member states. Along the x-axis, we see there is significant variation in local voting rights for EU citizens (SCNs)—this is the same variable from Fig. 11.1—and along the y-axis, further variation for TCNs. In the upper-right corner we see a cluster of around ten member states with inclusive practices for both SCNs and TCNs (including Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Variation within category results from registration procedures and residence (e.g., Denmark requires 3 years residence for TCNs; Netherlands 5).

Fig. 11.2

Local Voting Rights for SCNs and TCNs

It is worth remarking on the generally bifurcated nature of the access to local voting rights for TCNs, where eleven member states are below .4 (i.e., trend toward exclusion). From a normative standpoint, this is problematic. TCNs may have lived in a country for years and due to strict nationality laws, some may be unable to naturalize. Maas (2008, 583) refers to the differential in rights between SCNs and TCNs as evidence that “EU citizenship’s transformative potential remains unrealized,” though the introduction of local voting rights for TCNs alongside SCNs in 2004 accession states (e.g., Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia) clearly constitute a “transformative effect” of EU membership. We also see a cluster of states where local voting rights are restricted for both SCN and TCN: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus and Poland.

The preceding discussion illustrates EU citizenship as incomplete, imbalanced across states, and inconsistent within states. This paints a mixed picture – one where real rights are obtained and meaningful integration can be facilitated, but also portends larger issues when considering coherence across the Union. The question that remains: What are the policy consequences of this type of a limited and uneven EU citizenship for Europe? What kind of authority can a democratic political entity claim if it is sustained by weak connection to those purportedly responsible for conferring legitimacy?

This next section turns form citizens to the polity as part of the analysis of “reflective consequences.” I explore three policy issues to illustrate the consequences of what I term “underdevelopment” of EU citizenship: Enlargement, national citizenship eligibility, and Brexit (or what I describe as the problem of “suprastatelessness”). In each, EU citizenship is unable to address the problem at hand and, in many ways, generates more problems than it solves.

4 Consequences of Weak EU Citizenship: Some Examples

4.1 Enlargement

Enlargement presented two central challenges to EU citizenship. First, as already discussed, it introduced new negotiating partners into an evolving EU citizenship-making process, which necessarily disrupted an equilibrium with new goals and priorities. On top of substantive differences between Accession members and “older” member states, Enlargement also coincided with changes to voting procedure through the Treaty of Nice, whereby qualified majority voting was extended to free movement (and, thus, no longer required unanimity). This made it more likely for lowest common denominator solutions which could pass majority threshold. As Maas (2007, 79) notes, “those who hoped that European integration would shift from a focus on economic integration toward an increasing emphasis on individual rights were disappointed [with Enlargement].”

Second, the citizens of new member states—eager to exercise new opportunities for labor market mobility and worker rights—were difficult to integrate into existing labor market arrangements. Here, the issue is not that EU citizenship was incomplete, but it was almost too complete. It offered more to new member state citizens in terms of labor mobility and rights than existing members states were willing to give. With the 2004 Enlargement (which included eight countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, as well as former British colonies of Cyprus and Malta), there was trepidation among receiving, older members states in admitting migrants from new member states with high unemployment, e.g., Poland. Thus, as part of EU accession, a number of existing member states could establish transitional arrangements that limited labor movement. There was significant range in the amount of restrictions member states applied to new labor. On one end of the spectrum, Germany and Austria applied the full, seven-year protective period (lifting restrictions in 2011). On the other, in the 2004 enlargement round, only the UK, Sweden, and Ireland fully and immediately opened their labor markets to new EU citizens. British policymakers based their decision off the immediate labor market access granted to Spain and Portugal in 1986, which had a modest impact on the British labor market. Thus, they did not anticipate that over one million Polish workers would move to the UK and become a feature of the British service economy (Burrell, 2016). In the subsequent 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and 2013 (Croatia) rounds, the lineup of full versus limited access was different and, in the end, Ireland received more Polish workers per capita than the UK. Restrictions in response to 2007 weren’t lifted until 2014¹¹ and, in the case of Austria’s response to Croatian accession, restrictions were maintained until as recently as May 2019. Enlargement not only quickly revealed the limitations and conditionality of EU citizenship, it established a type of probationary status, perpetuating imbalance across the member states. This prevented further harmonization and consolidation of citizen rights—namely welfare rights—which would have been more difficult to distribute across the member states.

Moreover, Enlargement reveals how the labor benefits of EU citizenship ultimately do not depend on the relationship between the citizen of a state and the supranational but of the citizenship-conferring member state to the EU. Member states could only decide to delay access of new EU citizens to their labor markets—not any other benefits of EU membership like entry or residence—though access to employment and economic integration facilitates other forms of integration, including citizenship acquisition (Peters et al., 2018). Put another way, older member states in this case set the terms of economic integration. While one effect of the accession on May 1, 2004 was immediate regularization of thousands of migrants who held irregular status, these individuals continued to experience economic integration as outsiders despite newly-procured, formal EU citizenship status.

4.2 Immigration and Eligibility for National Citizenship

Citizenship is a discrete group, a type of club membership. A key challenge to EU authority is that it can only control who gets EU citizenship secondarily. We already discussed its derived status, and that EU citizens are made by gaining national citizenship of member states. But who becomes eligible to even begin the process of naturalization – that is, who is allowed to immigrate – is also a power for the member states alone. The EU has a common external border, but not a common immigration policy, notwithstanding the considerable regulatory power of the EU with regard to national policies of family migration and asylum. Put another way, the EU lacks immigration authority outside of decisions pertaining to the common market, with especially weak competence when it comes to harmonization of labor migration policies (e.g., EU blue card for highly skilled). This creates asymmetry of authority; national governments decide who enters and, ultimately, gets national and EU citizenship. This is the problem of imbalance or “horizontal equality” (Kochenov, 2017, xxviii), as it is these very individuals that ultimate convey legitimacy.

It is particularly visible when considering two types of citizenship acquisition: investment citizenship, or jus pecuniae (Dzankic, 2012), and inheritance citizenship, where citizenship is transmitted across generations to individuals who, unlike new immigrants, are born abroad yet permitted to skip integration measures. Most countries in the world maintain jus sanguinis provisions by which children inherit the citizenship of their parents without fulfilling integration requirements, like passing a language test or demonstrating citizenship knowledge. The concern here is the disparity between someone who inherits citizenship across several generations without residence versus an immigrant residing in a country that has to fulfil many requirements. Both investment and inheritance lay bare the imbalance of citizenship access within states, exacerbating EU citizenship access across member states.

Beginning with investment citizenship, as previously mentioned, three EU members states maintain explicit investor citizenship schemes—Bulgaria (since 2005), Cyprus (since 2007) and Malta (since 2013).¹² In the latter, the Malta Individual Investor Program aims to recruit high net worth investors and for upwards of €650,000,¹³ applicants can buy Maltese citizenship and, therefore, the mobility to live, work, and travel in the EU.¹⁴ In January 2019, the European Commission published its Report on Investor Citizenship Schemes, raising concern about the de-linking of citizenship and residence, as well as the marketing of investment citizenship not as a national policy but a way to obtain the rights and privileges of EU citizenship.¹⁵ It also suggested the sale of passports should be linked to conditionality criteria for new accession states. The Commission has no direct competence to regulate citizenship, yet this report aptly reflects how immigration—through investment citizenship as one example—poses new problems that existing institutions cannot solve. And, as described earlier, clamping down on investment citizenship became an acute priority in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, to prevent wealthy Russian oligarchs from buying refuge in the EU, so to speak.

Inheritance citizenship is a second case. Most states make provisions for children and grandchildren of citizens to inherit citizenship. But some countries maintain extraterritorial jus sanguinis rules that have generated huge potentials of EU born abroad based on ancestry, including Italy and Spain.¹⁶ Some cases to illustrate the extreme difference in potential citizenship suffice. Greece and Germany, acquisition by cultural affinity requires demonstrating knowledge of the language or other conditions of naturalization, but oftentimes generational acquisition bypasses naturalization conditions, creating asymmetry between immigrants that jump through high hoops to obtain citizenship, compared to descendants living abroad that merely file paperwork and pay a fee. This type of internal inconsistency in citizenship assignment, as well as cross-national imbalance in assignment practices, ultimately undermines the coherence of an EU citizenship as an equitable membership category. States have near-total discretion to maintain whatever citizenship rules they like, but when an additional layer of EU rights is a consequence of that decision, there are clear and problematic democratic implications.

4.3 Brexit and Suprastatelessness

On June 23, 2016 British citizens voted to leave the EU (a slim but decisive majority of 51.9% to Leave versus 48.1 Remain). On January 31, 2020, they finally left. The interim period was defined by great uncertainty about the ability to “deliver Brexit,” including what relationship the UK would have with the EU moving forward. This is when the status of EU citizens—both those living in the UK and British nationals using that status to live and work in Europe—became critical, affecting millions of people. EU citizens living in Britain lost protection, access, and status, and underwent years of uncertainty about their legal status, followed by bureaucratic hurdles for obtaining residency to continue living in a place they are already resident. The UK Settlement Scheme offers settled and pre-settled status for EU citizens and requires proof of identity and proof of continuous residence.

It is not surprising that EU citizenship did not grandfather-in protections for citizens of a state that chose to leave the EU. However, it is revealing is that EU citizenship status was not retained by British nationals living in the EU, a figure estimated at approximately 1.2 million citizens. Preserving its derived nature, EU citizenship and the rights it conveys, were stripped from British nationals living and working in the EU. Some of these rights were eventually “reacquired” but only after negotiations and individuals navigating dense, bureaucratic red tape. And, contrary to what many feared, in Brexit negotiations, the EU insisted and the UK agreed to preserve residence and labor market access rights for EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU. The implementation was far from perfect and required national legislation in EU member states, but the principle of maintaining as far as possible EU citizenship rights for those that would lose status was part of the consensus opinion.

Some British citizens used existing ties to take matters into their own hands. Around 500,000 British people applied for Irish citizenship during the first half of 2017. Uniquely, British Jews began to reapply for German citizenship in record numbers (eligible to “repatriate” if their families lost German citizenship between 1933 and 1945).¹⁷

But where opportunities to naturalize or hold dual citizenship are not possible, EU member states took different positions on their obligation. Several different models were initially floated to prevent rights deprivation for soon-to-be EU-less citizens, including the option model (e.g., Greenland), associate citizenship (van den Brink & Kochenov, 2019) and automatic naturalization (Huber, 2019). Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands were early guarantors that resident British citizens would have immediate access to residency permits. Eventually all EU states passed Brexit transition laws to this effect. The right to live and work in the EU for British nationals was guaranteed under the Withdrawal Agreement, but then directs the responsibility to each member state to set up a settlement scheme to register British citizens. The right to work and live across the EU ceased after the transition period, and citizens needed to apply to EU countries according to existing immigration rules.

There is an irony in these debates: after decades of building up an EU citizenship, it was not only thinkable but inevitable that some people will become immediately decoupled from that project in the case of a member state exiting. Citizenship rights – once won – are supposed to be difficult to unravel or take away, an teleological insight that dates back to T.H. Marshall (1950). International law protects individuals from statelessness, but there has yet to be an articulated legal argument that transfers up to the supranational level. While some like Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian Prime Minister and Member of European Parliament (MEP) since 2009, advocated for a type of “European associated citizenship,” where EU member states granted British citizens living in Europe the full rights of EU citizens, this idea did not catch on more widely. EU status still proved valuable as British citizens living in member states sought permanent residence through citizenship. But this was bottom-up. We can remark on the absence of an aspirational vision in this critical moment and vast difference in political will compared to the EU’s pre-Maastricht days.

5 Discussion

By simultaneously examining the consequences of EU citizenship on individuals as well as on the conferring organization, this paper provides a framework for thinking about what role citizenship might play in supporting immigrant integration at multiple levels, from the supranational to the national to the local level. This chapter reveals that while citizenship provides economic mobility and political integration at the sub- and supranational level for some—two important objectives that meaningfully fill the gaps left behind by national and local policies—it remains a status rife with inconsistencies.

Given these inconsistencies—and in keeping with the “reflective” analysis, we have one final question to address. We know what EU citizenship does and does not deliver for individuals, but what are the consequences on the rights-conferring polity, in terms of democratic legitimacy or even political authority? If citizenship establishes transactional ties between an individual and a democratic polity, what does it say about political legitimacy if that status is incomplete in rights attached to it, inconsistently accessed, and unevenly experienced? On the one hand, one can argue the EU does not even need a common citizenship. Citizenship may be a poor term for what exists—a series of privileges, from consular protection to mobility rights, without the expectations that individuals convey institutional legitimacy. On the other hand, the stated purpose of EU citizenship (TEU, Title II, Article 10) is to establish ties of democratic legitimacy, in both empowering EU citizens to vote European parliament elections and locally in municipal elections. The EU is a political union, where democratic legitimacy remains a central objective (Kohler-Koch & Rittberger, 2007) and where domestic dissensus is often the source for unravelling supranational goals (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). And given legitimacy and collective identity are inextricable (Benhabib, 1994), the encapsulation of these in citizenship has direct consequence for authority.

There are several reasons to think weak EU citizenship erodes legitimacy for the EU. First, the imbalanced and inconsistent nature of EU citizenship perpetuates a type of stratified citizenship. This is a serious problem for democratic systems. Domestic politics would not consider democracy legitimate in such contexts, as legitimacy is then only derived from those who are empowered (Caraway, 2004). Why would we think otherwise for the legitimacy of the EU itself? Second, the incompleteness of EU citizenship widens the gap between the suprastate and the individual. One of the central purposes behind recent attempts at enhancing EU citizenship was to repair the democratic deficit, but stratified access to this right across the member states, not to mention low participation rates, does not achieve this goal. Third, there is increased skepticism of EU institutions and EU authority itself. Populist parties, Eurosceptics, and libertarian voices are recurring challenges to EU authority. Finally, in an observation similar to that made by Jones et al. (2016) regarding eurozone governance, it may be that EU citizenship achieved politically expedient goals in the short term, but undermine public support in the long term. That is, it is an example where overclaiming by pro-Europeans created outsized expectations and, ultimately, disenchantment.

A product of its own evolution, these inconsistencies reverberate across the member states to perpetuate an uneven status both across and within member states. Ultimately, this has not only for individuals but, ultimately, for the policy, both in terms of democratic legitimacy—where citizens that experience uneven rights and status are a threat to regime consolidation—and political authority, whereby the citizen-polity becomes tenuous. EU citizenship was initially designed to enable cross-border labor mobility. That eventually this became the very facet of citizenship that member states found contentious—even invasive of their sovereign, national prerogative to control borders (e.g., Brexit)—suggests citizenship is not the panacea democratic theorists, Eurocrats and Europhiles had hoped for. A sober reflection three decades after codification, and in the context of robust national populist support and democratic decline in EU member states, like Hungary and Poland, suggest the limitations of EU citizenship only skim the surface, and are unable to resolve or address deeper authority problems at hand.

With weak citizenship, a generous read of EU capacity is that it can proficiently and effectively regulate, but not meaningfully govern or represent. Self-limited authority and deliberately weak citizenship are necessarily modest—it prohibits fears of sovereignty encroachment and remains within bounds of appropriateness for suprastate organizations—but also short-sighted. There may be challenges in the future—even in the near present-day—in which citizens need EU authority and protection—immediate issues like status deprivation and consular services and safeguards against domestic authoritarian change (e.g., Hungary), but also imminent and ambiguous challenges like pandemics.

A more concerning conclusion might be that the EU is less dogmatic about democratic ideals over time (e.g., Kelemen, 2020), allowing momentum on EU citizenship to plateau due to indifference. The equilibrium is that the EU continues to operate as a regulatory authority. However, given the weak and incomplete nature of citizenship—and, thus, a shallow reservoir for deriving legitimacy—it struggles still to secure democratic, governing authority.