Keywords

1 Introduction

Citizenship has been one of the central political concepts since the inception of the Greek polis. Since then, it has gone through a myriad of transformations assuming various meanings and implying numerous normative expectations (Isin 1997) from very modest (simply having a passport) to very ambitious ones (espousing civic friendship vis-à-vis other citizens or even self-sacrifice for a community of citizens). Even though the 1990s and their concomitant globalisation hype brought about a certain scepticism about the usefulness of citizenship (e.g. Soysal 1994), more recently its relevance has become quite evident, in particular with Russia’s war against Ukraine where citizens are literally ‘under fire’ (see also Ben-Porath 2009) and subject to physical and cultural annihilation. A specific case of citizenship remains however—EU citizenship, which transnationally expands nation-state citizenship by focusing on cross-border mobility and transnational participation rights. Moreover, with the Eastern enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007, the EU has been confronted with the issues of democratisation and the consolidation of democracy, as the majority of the newcomer member states transitioned from non-democratic regimes.

EU citizenship was introduced with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, as it was a further step towards involving citizens more in the European integration project (e.g. Meehan 1993; Wiener 1998). The Union citizenship, as it is formally called, established the free movement of persons across EU internal borders and territorially extended political rights (e.g. the European Parliament elections). With more recent EU treaties, like the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, new participation rights, such as the European Citizens’ Initiative, were established. Still, cross-border mobility rights represent the core of EU citizenship. They can generate a vast potential for citizens in ECE but also become a further source of inequality concerning the peripheral areas.

The latter is the more relevant, as the key conceptual issue with citizenship remains the equality of status. By definition, all citizens are supposed to have equal access to their rights despite socio-economic, territorial, educational and cultural differences. The question remains, however, whether some groups of citizens, for instance, young people and the inhabitants of peripheral areas, might be subject to structural exclusion from their rights—not necessarily in a formal but rather in a practical sense—and whether EU citizenship can mitigate or worsen this problem.

Firstly, the chapter sketches some key issues of citizenship research, including EU citizenship. It also problematises them concerning the peripheral areas and young citizens. Secondly, it formulates three recommendations for research on citizenship, specifically EU citizenship, with regard to peripheral or rural areas in East Central Europe (ECE). The recommendations focus on (1) the difference between urban and rural citizenship, (2) direct social rights and (3) the EU citizenship as a nested and enacted citizenship.

2 Key Issues of Citizenship Research

There are several key issues citizenship studies have been dealing with for a long time. Among others, these include (1) the citizenship-democracy nexus, (2) the responsibilities of citizenship and (3) technological advancement and its impact on citizenship. I will briefly sketch these issues, also with reference to EU citizenship, as they inform the upcoming recommendations for citizenship research.

2.1 Citizenship-Democracy Nexus

Citizenship and democracy can be viewed as ‘twin concepts’, as they belong to the same semantic realm of political self-determination, participation and belonging (see Zilla 2022). There is no democracy without citizenship, nor is there proper citizenship without democracy. In this sense, citizenship means more than having the formal citizenship of a specific country—expressed formally by a national passport. Attacks on democracy, democratic breakdowns or democratic backsliding go hand in hand with pressure on citizenship rights, and assaults on civic freedoms are, for that matter, assaults on citizenship. Even more, citizenship in non-democratic regimes ceases to be proper citizenship, which we can presently see, for instance, in Iran where the government has been attacking, torturing and killing protesting citizens, in particular young people. It remains ‘citizenship’ only in name, since authoritarian and totalitarian regimes use it as a tool of domination and repressive rule (Kochenov 2019), and for that reason, citizenship becomes the very opposite of what it means.

In Hannah Arendt’s famous account (see p. 296 in Arendt 1967), citizenship means ‘the right to have rights’, that is, the right of citizens to determine themselves the kind and the degree of rights they want to enjoy in a political community. In this sense, citizenship implies meaningful participation opportunities and a real impact on the political decision making through democratic practices and institutions. In some ECE countries, such as Hungary and Poland, the issue of democratic backsliding is pertinent, which also has an impact on EU citizenship, as citizens of both countries are also EU citizens. In the EU, democracy and the rule of law acquired an essential role with the Copenhagen criteria of 1993 as a precondition for EU membership. Practically, the screening of the democratisation progress in the new member states by the European Commission implies that democracy—which was not originally part of the 1957 Treaty of Rome—became integral to EU citizenship.

In most cases, (nation-)states are viewed as guarantors of citizenship, as they are supposed to mitigate the asymmetries of citizenship, for instance, by equalising rural areas with the urban centres to guarantee the equal status of citizenship. In other words, citizenship has to be ‘equalised’ via the polity, as equal status does not exist by default. Against this backdrop, statelessness is sometimes viewed as a nightmare of citizenship, as it is a serious threat to civil rights and even human rights, which is one of the key topics in Hannah Arendt’s work (e. g. Arendt 1945; also Bernstein 2005). But what happens when the state is the actor violating citizenship by, for instance, attacking democratic institutions? Can the EU help solve this problem?

2.2 The Responsibilities of Citizenship

There is no citizenship of an isolated ‘unencumbered self’, as it is the membership in a political community that renders individuals into citizens. In some accounts, citizenship is mainly related to rights, as these are the main mechanism of community ‘production’. In his seminal work, Marshall (1950) argued that citizenship is subject to a historical process of expansion to include different types of rights (civil, political and social) to an ever-larger number of societal groups. Only with all three types of rights, citizenship is fully fledged. Social rights follow civil and political ones as a pinnacle of an evolving citizenship in a modern state, and to some scholars, they represent the very test of mature citizenship still today. Recently, researchers have pointed to social rights being endangered by the liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation of public space, and they interpret these as an erosion of citizenship (cf. Woods 2006; also Fourcade 2021). In the EU, social citizenship relates mainly to the mutual recognition and harmonisation of (some) social rights of the member states, based on the non-discrimination principle vis-à-vis EU citizens. For instance, EU citizens maintain health insurance in any EU member state by the virtue of being insured in their state of origin—but only temporary, for the time of their stay. Also, for that reason (if not only for that), some scholars (e.g. Preuss and Everson 1996) considered EU citizenship incomplete and rather an appendix to national citizenships and therefore epiphenomenal. Recent studies suggest that even this modest non-discrimination-based access to social rights has been subject to retrenchment by the member states (Barbulescu and Favell 2020).

However, citizenship includes also duties connecting individual citizens to their political community—the duties of the community vis-à-vis the citizens and the duties of citizens towards each other. The political community, in its institutionalised form as a government, upholds obligations vis-à-vis the citizens. The ancient Roman citizens—to some students of citizenship still an ideal of citizenship—were fully protected even outside the boundaries of the Roman state: An attack on any Roman citizen meant retaliation by the Roman state. This idea of protection also applies to modern nation-states, as the passport is not only a token of belonging to a particular state, but it also indicates the obligation to support its citizens, should something unfortunate happen to them. The obligation to protect belongs thus to the core of citizenship as a duty of the polity vis-à-vis the citizens. This is also a relevant aspect of EU citizenship, as the EU has the obligation to protect EU citizens abroad. When in need, EU citizens can seek the protection of any EU member state embassy should they be unable to contact the embassy of their member state.

Simultaneously, responsibilities among citizens are discussed as being the necessary elements of citizenship (Banting and Kymlicka 2017; Jelin 2019). These are not given attributes or the dispositions of citizens, since they need to be put into action, reiterated and reconstructed through mutual obligations. In an even stronger version, the citizen is primarily a ‘holder of duties’ vis-à-vis the political community, as, for instance, the holding of a political office is regarded as a necessary and welcome burden of responsibility. This Aristotelian perspective of citizenship is quite rare nowadays, as it is deemed unfeasible in the modern work-orientated society. Still, in this view, belonging to a community comes with the normative expectations of how the citizens are supposed to act within a (often territorially bounded) community, in being responsible for other citizens. Citizens are not just random individuals or strangers that only happen to live on the same territory. They have particular duties to each other, as citizenship is not coincidental but based on a coherent collective construction within and social closure to the outside. Here, the question of the equality of status is central, as differences between, for instance, rural and urban areas might have an impact on citizenship. The question arises in how far the political community has the responsibility to take care of citizens with less access to civic resources, such as culture, and the civic infrastructure, such as public administration, parliaments and NGOs. In turn, the lack of obligations in EU citizenship on the part of the citizens has been regarded as problematic (e.g. Bellamy 2015), as it only represents a ‘thin’ form of citizenship without civic obligations.

2.3 Technological Advancement and Citizenship

In the last 20 years, technological advancement in the digital realm has been changing the spatial dimension of citizenship. New digital forms of citizenship have developed and shifted citizens’ activity more into social media and also have allowed for the digital forms of participation and political activity in cyberspace (Isin and Ruppert 2020). As governmental institutions become increasingly reliant on digital solutions and offer digital services, citizens are also more involved in digital citizenship. This applies particularly to the technologically savvy young people whose lives have become digitally imprinted to a much higher degree than was the case 20 years ago. Against this background, labels such as ‘e-government’ and ‘digital era governance’ made their way into the discourse on citizenship. More radical approaches to digital citizenship believe in the vast potential of digital citizenship, particularly when it comes to circumventing the citizenship of the nation-state.

A more recent account of ‘stateless citizenship’—quite the opposite of the Arendtian approach—is closely connected to new financial technologies, cryptocurrencies generating ‘crypto-nomads’ seeking to get rid of the state, mainly due to tax avoidance, but interpreted as a new form of freedom based on radical individualism (Lipton and Livni 2021). However, stateless citizenship appears to be a contradiction in terms, as it is mainly about avoiding the obligations of citizenship. It follows anarchistic fantasies which often assume the forms of crypto-libertarianism, combined with a belief in the freedom of the markets and civil liberties without the presence of the state. Here, the difference between the rural and urban areas is irrelevant, since digital citizenship happens in cyberspace. The only thing that seems to matter to digital stateless citizens is the processing power of the computer servers and access to a broadband internet. In contrast, critical positions highlight the demise of citizenship in cyberspace, mostly due to polarisation, disinformation and ideological bubbles in the social media (Habermas 2022). However, digital citizenship can also mitigate the problems of having a limited access to citizenship in peripheral areas and empower young people living there, provided there are necessary investments into the digital infrastructure. In particular, in large-scale polities like the EU where distances between citizens and the centres of power are long, the digital instruments of citizenship could promote participation and a feeling of belonging.

Against this backdrop, EU citizenship seems to offer several opportunities that could mitigate the vicissitudes of citizenship when it comes to the young people in the peripheral areas of ECE. The EU expands national citizenship and restructures it within a new polity. With this, the Union citizenship is a case of a transnational citizenship (e.g. Kleger 1997), which is contingent on national citizenships, but still has the potential for further development. Its value as a ‘nomadic citizenship’ has been stressed, since European citizenship is framed as a progressive (and also progressing) project (e.g. Braidotti 2019), perhaps even with a potential to ‘equalise’ citizenship across various age groups and urban and peripheral areas, including the rural ones. Still, there are challenges to EU citizenship, which need to be addressed and systematically explored by research. One of the major issues is that the right to mobility, which is presently the centrepiece of EU citizenship, can become a double-edged sword. It gives transnational rights to EU citizens, but it also stimulates them to leave peripheral areas and move to more attractive (urban) places in the EU, thus furthering the depopulation of peripheral areas and an inequality of status. This raises the question of whether mobility rights can still be justified as a central aspect of EU citizenship and should the equality of status be taken seriously.

3 Recommendations

Recommendation 1: More conceptual research is needed on urban versus rural citizenship in ECE

Citizens are supposed to enjoy the same set of rights despite belonging to different classes and having different socio-economic statuses, education or places of living, the latter mainly concerning urban versus rural areas. This equality of status is underpinned by a ‘sense of community’ that binds the citizens together, ‘glues’ them socially and generates civic resources such as mutual solidarity. However, the political reality in ECE countries (and in other regions for that matter) might be different when it comes to urban and rural areas. This is, however, not only an empirical issue but a conceptual problem of citizenship research. Already ancient Greek citizenship was closely connected with the city-state, in which rural areas were not necessarily at the political centre. Only in the polis or rather in the city centre thereof, ‘proper citizens’ decided upon their fate, as they practised political self-autonomy (Weber 1999/1921). This urban citizenship still inspires the bulk of political theorists today. French classical sociology is largely city- and urbanity-orientated, which affects today’s discourse considerably, with Jacques le Goff’s ‘love for the cities’ (Le Goff 1997) as one of the most visible positions thereof. Also, the present Anglo-Saxon understanding of citizenship is strongly tilted towards the city. For instance, for Benjamin Barber—who is a proponent of ‘strong democracy’—citizenship is practised mainly in cosmopolitan cities nowadays, rather than nation-states, as the cities become interconnected into ‘webs of culture, commerce, and communication that encircle the globe’ creating a sort of cosmopolis. To Barber, the ‘urban dwellers’ are the proper citizens of the twenty-first century, as they are involved in the “miracle of civic “glocality” promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology, and solutions in place of sovereignty” (see p. 31 in Barber 2013).

This does not leave much space for the citizens of peripheral areas, unless they want to move to the cities. In rural areas, in particular, young people might be excluded from the privileges of citizenship, as they have limited access to higher education, labour opportunities and culture and for that reason might be viewed as lesser citizens. As a result, rural areas might be ‘places that do not matter’ where economic decay and a lack of opportunities render them also places with ‘no future’ (Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Access to citizenship requires certain skills, in particular educational and language skills, without which participation in the public sphere, deliberation and communication are impossible or at least strongly limited. This holds even more true for EU citizenship, which requires more than a basic command of the working languages of the EU: English or French. However, access to effective linguistic education, necessary for EU citizenship, cannot be taken for granted in many peripheral areas. This is certainly not only the case in ECE but also in some old member states (see Lorenz in this volume). Nonetheless, more research is needed on the role of language and EU citizenship. Critical studies point to a one-dimensional diversity in the EU language policy and its problematic consequences for EU citizenship (Kraus 2008).

The EU institutions seem to be aware of the asymmetry between urban and rural areas, as they advanced several programmes and studies, such as the EU rural development policy or ‘A long-term vision for the EU’s rural areas’. Nonetheless, the public visibility of EU citizenship is tilted towards ‘urban citizenship’, as is the case with the European Capitals of Culture programme favouring certain cities (Sassatelli 2009; Schneider and Jacobsen 2019). Research on citizenship would have to deal with the question of whether the EU needs a more specific rural citizenship policy, directly targeting issues connected to young people in rural areas beyond the promotion of transnational mobility rights, which might lead to the depopulation of rural areas. There are studies on rural governance from the UK (Parker 1996) or the Netherlands (de Haan et al. 2019), such as on governing rural communities, which could deliver some ideas concerning citizens’ initiatives in the rural areas of ECE and which could foster the empowerment of citizens there. The questions of asymmetries and unequal access are central for a general conceptual discourse on citizenship but also for EU citizenship research. This could also mean that the EU is confronted with a dual structure of citizenship in the member states: the urban ‘civic miracle’ and rural ‘places that do not matter’. Exploring this issue, both conceptually and empirically, should become the key tenet of future research on EU citizenship.

Recommendation 2: More research is needed on the role of the EU in strengthening direct social rights in the rural areas of ECE

Research on peripheral areas, in particular in ECE, is ambivalent regarding the distinction between urban and rural citizenship. Some scholars point to the different practices of citizenship in rural areas: starting from significant differences in the standard of living between urban and rural areas to the access to certain services and infrastructures, including welfare rights (Yarwood 2017). Citizenship research argues that the practices of citizenship are heavily dependent on citizens’ infrastructures such as services, employment and transport to achieve full citizenship rights. As a consequence, poor, disabled or young people might become trapped by rural localities, prohibiting them from achieving their full citizenship (Cresswell 2009). For that reason, rural areas might promote ‘semi-citizenship’, rather than a fully fledged one. In this regard, research on citizenship needs to pay more attention to how EU citizenship can contribute to mitigating the problems of rural citizenship and its asymmetries. One could argue that the EU promotes rural citizenship mainly through direct payments to rural households within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). However, these payments also produce asymmetries and for that reason promote the problem of an unequal access and semi-citizenship. For instance, the majority of farmers in Poland or Romania are smallholders who enjoy only limited EU support through the CAP, due to the modest size of their farming land. The other inhabitants of rural areas are often people who lost their job in industry. Only 10% of citizens living in rural areas are involved in agriculture for a living (Wilkin and Halasiewicz 2022; see also p. 252 f. in Dachin 2022). As a result, only large-scale farms are subject to proper support by the CAP, and for the rest of the citizens in rural areas, the EU has only very limited visibility and relevance.

Against this background, EU citizenship research should pay more attention to social rights, with which the EU could strengthen rural citizenship. Social rights are not only limited in the EU citizenship but are based mainly on mutual recognition (e.g. concerning pension schemes or a temporary EU health insurance card) across the member states. This might reflect the nature of the EU as a ‘regulatory state’ (Majone 1996), since the EU is not a traditional polity with larger redistribution competences and a larger budget. Still, social and welfare rights appear to be central concerns among young people. In the group discussions with students in peripheral areas, reported in the first part of this volume, social aspects, like a health insurance card, access to clean drinking water and the provision of security by the EU, received utmost attention and were more popular than other rights related to the EU.

Against this background, EU citizenship research should pay more attention to direct social rights by the EU. This is not only because Marshall’s theory focuses on social rights as the final stage of citizenship development. It also follows the argument of Neil Fligstein (2009) that the EU needs to provide—or at least facilitate—benefits to the citizens that have profited less from the EU project so far, in particular, if the goal is to achieve a meaningful feeling of citizenship. The EU project tends, however, to privilege some groups of people: managers, professionals and white-collar workers, who profit from the single market and the mobility opportunities of the EU. They come from urban areas and are, more often than not, well educated. More research needs to be done into EU social measures that can promote a more equality of status among citizens and thus mitigate problems of semi-citizenship. This could include even more investments into the Erasmus exchange programme for school students—rather than only university students—combined with a system of stipends favouring rural areas and support for people deciding to return to the ‘periphery’ with their newly acquired educational resources. This is closely related to the question of how transnational mobility affects EU citizenship by promoting asymmetrical push and pull effects (see also Lorenz and Anders in this volume). Thus, research should deal more systematically with the structural incentives of the EU citizenship, as, for instance, young people in the peripheral areas of ECE can be structurally stimulated–by the very nature of EU citizenship—to leave, rather than stay, thus negatively impacting rural citizenship. Already in 2001, Philippe C. Schmitter and Michael W. Bauer argued in favour of a direct expansion of social citizenship in the European Union by establishing a Euro scholarship, which would alleviate the social exclusion in the peripheral regions of the EU and would be a case of direct social redistribution by the EU, rather than social regulation. In this way, EU citizenship in rural areas could become more symmetrical as opposed to the limited group-orientated direct payments to the farmers. Schmitter and Bauer made their (modest as they call it) proposal specifically concerning the ECE countries in the wake of an Eastern enlargement, as they envisaged a growing inequality between the West and East. Presently, the asymmetries in ECE are not only between the West and East (as the socio-economic distance has on average diminished) but also between the prosperous urban centres and the underprivileged periphery in ECE—an issue that needs to be further explored.

Recommendation 3: More research on EU citizenship as a nested and enacted citizenship

EU citizenship can be viewed as a nested citizenship (Faist 2001), which combines several levels of the EU multilevel governance. In the multilevel polity of the EU, citizenship is dispersed across various levels: the municipal, the national and the European. In this sense, civil, social and political rights can be attached to the different levels of the EU polity, rather than be evenly integrated within one political space of the EU. This integration means that in a nested citizenship there is a dependence of the levels on each other. Not only the European level of citizenship depends on the national one, but also, for instance, the local one depends on the European one. Should the local level espouse citizenship challenges, the EU level would also be responsible for mitigating them. This follows from the claim that the EU is a union of both member states and citizens. This double structure of EU legitimacy implies that the EU institutions have the obligation to protect all EU citizens, not just those abroad and outside of the EU. Partially, this obligation is noticeable in the EU’s responsibility to enhance the living standards of the poorer regions of the EU and to invest in the infrastructure therein (mainly through the European Structural and Investment Funds). This reflects the aforementioned idea of ‘semi-citizenship’ which needs the ‘prosthetics’ of citizenship, that is, the infrastructure, access and education, to become a fully fledged citizenship.

However, EU citizenship research has largely ignored the more political challenges to a nested citizenship. Under the conditions of democratic backsliding, rural areas might also contribute to the limiting of civic rights. Rural areas establish more social control due to their smaller spaces, as people more often know each other personally. At the same time, rural areas in ECE tend to be more conservative, and by the same token they might establish more social barriers to some forms of protest. For instance, reports on women’s protests against the abortion law in small towns and villages in Poland confirm exactly this. In rural areas, it is more difficult to mobilise citizens’ protests, as social pressure from the local community and the Catholic Church is higher and more palpable (Wernio 2020). This suggests not only that, in rural areas, access to the social and educational infrastructure of citizenship might be limited but also to the exercise of basic political rights. This raises the question of the EU’s responsibility towards these developments, or in other words the obligation to protect the EU citizens, whenever their rights are under pressure. Research on EU citizenship would need to deal with this issue more thoroughly.

A possibility (even if a modest one) would be to carry out more systematic research on connecting rural areas more strongly with democratic innovations that have been practised in urban areas, such as participatory budgeting, and enlarging the repertoires of citizenship. Participatory budgeting has been already practised in the rural areas of ECE, but, as often, it has suffered from underfunding (Leśniewska-Napierała 2019). This might be a chance for the EU to step in and get involved in promoting participatory budgeting, both financially and educationally. EU citizenship research should reflect on the potential of democratic innovations in dealing with democratic backsliding. Certainly, participatory budgeting is not a direct solution to violations of civic rights, but it could shift EU citizenship research into more concrete measures on how to deal with democratic backsliding in the peripheral areas of ECE, rather than reflect abstractly on the nature of the EU polity and democracy (or demoi-cracy).

Moreover, EU citizenship research should pay more attention to how young people in rural areas can learn and use democratic innovations practised at the EU level, including the European Citizens’ Initiative, online consultations or initiatives like the Conference on the Future of Europe. These modes of participation are relatively well studied. However, as the studies show (e.g. Kohler-Koch, 2011; Kies and Nanz 2013; Røed and Hansen 2018; Nahr 2018; Alander and von Ondarza 2020), these innovations tend to remain the citizenship practices of larger urban areas among well-educated citizens. An increased number of democratic innovations do not necessarily translate per se into a more societally even and regionally broader participation. This could change if more sortition-based instruments were to be used involving or even favouring rural areas.

In this context, EU citizenship could be viewed as an ‘enacted citizenship’ (Isin and Saward 2013), which promotes democratic innovations and participation opportunities and supports the citizens’ initiatives in rural areas, especially among technologically savvy young people. The term ‘enacted citizenship’ attaches much more value to the political acts of citizens than to their status. In this sense, citizenship is based on performative acts and claims, in which EU citizens contribute to the creation of what becomes citizenship. However, ‘enacted citizenship’ could also be thought of as citizenship, in which the EU makes the rights of citizenship salient and empowers citizens. This would extend the original meaning of an ‘enacted citizenship’ by introducing the activity of the EU to stimulate more active citizenship, in particular in the rural areas of ECE, where EU citizenship has a low salience. The digital tools of citizenship could play a relevant role in this context (see the chapters of Lorenz and Stein and Pentzold in this volume). While the EU invests in the digital infrastructure in poorer regions, it could also promote digital citizenship competencies, including language skills. While digital tools offer great potential for online participation, scholars highlight that digital citizenship, despite its new potential, produces further inequality among the educated and less educated citizens. Mossberger (2008) argues, for instance, that educational competencies are decisive for digital citizenship, in particular for political participation online. Hence, more research is needed into how digital tools may be both a source of empowerment and create further asymmetries in rural areas.

4 Conclusions

One of the major aspects of EU citizenship is that it is a case of transnational citizenship with moving boundaries, rather than traditional nation-state-based citizenship, associated with modern statehood. As a consequence, EU citizenship should not be framed as a territorially extended version of a national citizenship but a rather novel institution. In this view, EU citizenship belongs to a realm of institutionally framed interactions, rather than to nationally or ethnically bounded communities. As for citizenship in the EU, it was not a nation-state but the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which has played an essential role. The ECJ was decisive in the process of cementing and extending the rights of EU citizenship by developing a non-discrimination policy on the grounds of nationality, age or gender in legal cases.

Still, central aspects of traditionally understood citizenship, such as citizens’ rights and responsibilities, are valid and essential for EU citizenship. This is especially relevant for young people in the rural areas of ECE and the citizenship research that deals with it. The recommendations for EU citizenship research are based on several expectations, which also point to further research. Firstly, there might be a difference between urban and rural citizenships, which needs to be studied more systematically, also in the context of the EU. Should EU citizenship be framed as an ‘urban citizenship’ or be based on the interests of the urban population, it can have negative consequences for rural areas and violate the equality of status standard. The right to mobility within the EU, a centrepiece of EU citizenship, could strengthen this asymmetry even more. It gives transnational mobility rights to EU citizens, but it also stimulates them to leave rural areas and move to urban places in the EU, thus challenging the equality of status between urban and rural areas even further. Research should explore these two faces of EU citizenship, as there might be a ‘dual’ EU citizenship with an asymmetrical status. Secondly, the research should pay more attention to direct social rights within the EU, in particular concerning young people in rural areas. There are certainly budgetary limitations, given the modest size of the EU budget, but this issue has been neglected for years and would deserve more research. This is closely associated with studies on belonging to the EU and European identity, which had their hype in 2002–2010, but lost their impetus with the multiple EU crises and growing Euroscepticism. Nevertheless, citizenship also relates to questions of identity, membership and belonging where social rights are likely to play a central role. Thus, research on citizenship should revisit these concepts in the context of direct social rights in the EU. Thirdly, EU citizenship is a nested citizenship which implies the obligations of the EU vis-à-vis rural areas. This is especially the case, when democratic backsliding in EU member states occurs, as citizenship and democracy are intertwined. The EU could enact citizenship by promoting democratic innovations, citizens’ initiatives and governance in rural communities. This also applies to digital citizenship at the EU level, as digital space can generate opportunities for participation but can also produce and reproduce inequality. Thus, citizenship studies need to focus more systematically on cases where the equality of status is challenged.