Citizenship
Authors: Angie Gago, Francesco Maiani Publisher: Routledge, Journal of European Integration
In the context of the 2004 Enlargement, several EU governments reformed their social legislation to restrict the access to benefits of job-seeking or inactive EU citizens. Many of these restrictions were in tension with the case-law of the European Court of Justice, but when it came to judge their compatibility with EU law, the ECJ was more lenient than many anticipated. This article analyses this shift in ECJ case-law by looking at the dialogue between the Court and national authorities against the backdrop of EU legislative reform. It demonstrates that Member States contributed to the evolution of case-law by ‘pushing the boundaries’ of EU law both domestically and before the Court. It shows in particular how closely the arguments presented before the Court by national judiciaries or governments correlate with the new interpretations adopted by the Court itself. This is illustrated with empirical evidence from the UK and Germany.
Published in: Maurizio Ferrera and Rainer Bauböck (eds.), Should EU Citizenship be duty free? Authors: Frank Vandenbroucke Publisher: EUI – Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
In this GLOBALCIT forum debate, Maurizio Ferrera argues for strengthening EU citizenship in order to make it not only attractive for mobile Europeans but also for ‘stayers’ who feel left behind in processes of globalisation and European integration. According to Ferrera, EU citizenship is primarily ‘isopolitical’ and regulatory; it confers horizontal rights to people to enter the citizenship spaces of other member states and it imposes duties of non-discrimination on these states without providing for redistribution in response to perceived or real burdens resulting from free movement. Ferrera suggests several reforms that aim broadly at empowering the stayers. Among his proposals are an “EU social card”, universal transferrable vouchers for accessing social rights in other member states that stayers can pass on to their children who want to move, and a European wide social insurance scheme that would supplement those of the member states. He also suggests to strengthen EU citizenship with some soft duties, such as earmarking a small percentage of personal income tax for EU social policies or raising funds for such policies through fees on an EU social card or EU passports. Some respondents to Ferrera’s essay deny that free movement creates burdens that call for compensation or insist that EU citizenship should remain duty free. Others focus on the sources of solidarity and ask what duties of social justice apply to the EU. Several authors support Ferrera’s arguments while advocating bolder policy reforms.
Kickoff contribution and rejoinder by Maurizio Ferrera, contributions by Christian Joppke, Susanne K. Schmidt, Frank Vandenbroucke, Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen, Andrea Sangiovanni, Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Julia Hermann, Richard Bellamy, Rainer Bauböck, Theresa Kuhn, Ilaria Madama, Anton Hemerijck, Dora Kostakopoulou, Sandra Seubert and Philippe Van Parijs.
Authors: Ferrera, Maurizio; Bauböck, Rainer Publisher: EUI
In this GLOBALCIT forum debate, Maurizio Ferrera argues for strengthening EU citizenship in order to make it not only attractive for mobile Europeans but also for ‘stayers’ who feel left behind in processes of globalisation and European integration. According to Ferrera, EU citizenship is primarily ‘isopolitical’ and regulatory; it confers horizontal rights to people to enter the citizenship spaces of other member states and it imposes duties of non-discrimination on these states without providing for redistribution in response to perceived or real burdens resulting from free movement. Ferrera suggests several reforms that aim broadly at empowering the stayers. Among his proposals are an “EU social card”, universal transferrable vouchers for accessing social rights in other member states that stayers can pass on to their children who want to move, and a European wide social insurance scheme that would supplement those of the member states. He also suggests to strengthen EU citizenship with some soft duties, such as earmarking a small percentage of personal income tax for EU social policies or raising funds for such policies through fees on an EU social card or EU passports. Some respondents to Ferrera’s essay deny that free movement creates burdens that call for compensation or insist that EU citizenship should remain duty free. Others focus on the sources of solidarity and ask what duties of social justice apply to the EU. Several authors support Ferrera’s arguments while advocating bolder policy reforms.
Copyrighted articles of doctrine
Börner S., Marshall revisited: EU social policy from a social‐rights perspective, Journal of European Social Policy, 2020
The common legal and economic framework of the European Union (EU) has turned the vast socio-economic differences within Europe into virulent problems of social inequality – issues that it attempts to tackle within its limited resources. The article takes the EU’s self-expressed social commitment as a starting point and analyses its approaches to social policy from a social-rights perspective. It first discusses why Marshall’s social-citizenship concept provides a useful analytical tool to assess the social policies enacted so far at the European level and then presents an institutional analysis of the EU’s four major social-policy activities: harmonising, funding, coordination and cooperation. This analysis focuses on the horizontal and vertical relationships and the addressees of these policies to determine how these policies measure up against social-rights standards. The findings point to the poor development of transnational social citizenship given the special nature of EU social policies. The only social rights that exist at the European level are in the field of social-security coordination. And even those are marked by a double selectivity that excludes citizens who are not transnationally active and those who are but lack the necessary means to provide for themselves.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928720904330.
Menéndez A. J., Olsen E., Challenging European Citizenship. Ideas and Realities in Contrast, 2020, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
This book provides a critique of the way in which European citizenship is imagined and practiced. Setting their analysis in its full historical context, the authors challenge preconceived ideas about European citizenship on the basis of a detailed reconstruction of political, social and economic practice. In particular, they show the extent to which the elimination of formal internal borders within Europe has come hand in glove with the emergence of new socio-economic boundaries and the hardening of external borders. The book concludes with a number of concrete proposals to forge a genuinely post-national form of membership.
Pennings F., Seeleib-Kaiser M., EU Citizenship and Social Rights, Entitlements and Impediments to Accessing Welfare, 2018, Edward Elgar Publishing.
In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty introduced the right to free movement for EU citizens. In practice, however, there are substantial barriers to making use of this right, particularly to integration and to accessing the social and welfare rights available. This is particularly true when it comes to accessing social rights, such as social assistance, housing benefit, study grants and health care. This book provides a detailed description and thorough analysis of these barriers, in both law and practice.
Blauberger M., Heindlmaier A., Kramer D., Martinsen D.S., Sampson Thierry J., Schenk A., Werner B., ECJ Judges Read the Morning Papers. Explaining the Turnaround of European Citizenship Jurisprudence, Journal of European Public Policy, 2018, 25, 10, pp. 1422-1441.
Recent jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) marks a striking shift towards a more restrictive interpretation of EU citizens’ rights. The Court’s turnaround is not only highly relevant for practical debates about ‘Social Europe’ or ‘welfare migration’, but also enlightening from a more general, theoretical viewpoint. Several recent studies on the ECJ have argued that the Court is largely constrained by member state governments’ threats of legislative override and non-compliance. We show that an additional mechanism is necessary to explain the Court’s turnaround on citizenship. While the ECJ extended EU citizens’ rights even against strong opposition by member state governments, its recent shift reflects changes in the broader political context, i.e., the politicization of free movement in the European Union (EU). The article theorises Court responsiveness to politicization and demonstrates empirically, how the Court’s jurisprudence corresponds with changing public debates about EU citizenship.
Schnapper D., Nationalité et citoyenneté, Pouvoirs, 2017, 1, 160, pp. 61-71.
The fusion between nationality and citizenship has characterized the history of modern democracies. Today, some envisage a “new citizenship” that would be based on European construction or economic and social participation. Others argue in favor of dissociating citizenship from nationality. Can democratic societies dismiss the political dimension and all the traditions and institutions that structure the democratic system? Are nationality and citizenship separable?
Schiek D., Perspectives on social citizenship in the EU – from status positivus to status socialis activus via two forms of transnational solidarity, Queen’s University, 2015, Belfast,
Ever since the inauguration of EU citizenship, elements of social citizenship have been on the agenda of European integration. European level social benefits were proposed early on, and demands for collective labour rights have followed suit. This chapter uses the theoretical umbrella of transnational social citizenship in order to link transnational access to social benefits and collective labour rights. It promotes transnational rights as the best way to conceptualise EU social citizenship as an institution enabling the enjoyment of EU integration without being forced to forego social rights at other levels. Such a perspective sits well in a collection on EU citizenship and federalism, since it simultaneously challenges demands of renationalisation of social rights in the EU and pleas to reduce EU-level citizenship rights to a merely liberal dimension. Social citizenship as promoted here requires an interactive conceptualisation of regulatory and judicial powers at different levels of government as typical for federal systems.
In linking citizenship with human rights the chapter highlights different statuses of citizens. It argues that the rights constituted by social citizenship derive from a status positivus and a status socialis activus, expanding the time-honoured categories of Jellinek. This concept is developed further by linking the notions of receptive solidarity to the status positivus and the notion of participative solidarity to the status socialis activus. In relation to European Union citizenship it promotes a sustainable transnational social citizenship catering for receptive and participative solidarity.
These ideas contrast with most current discourses on EU citizenship. The stress on social citizenship takes issue with a retreat to mere liberalist notions of EU-level citizenship, and the stress on rights takes issue with conceptualising EU citizenship as a community bond with obligations, downplaying the empowering potential of rights. The difficulty of conceptualising transnational social citizenship is to avoid, on the one hand, taking up the tune of populist discourses imagining those moving beyond state borders as a threat to national social citizenship and, on the other hand, to reject the legitimate fears of those remaining at home of creating rupture in the social fabric of Europe’s society. Promoting transnational social citizenship rights based on receptive and participative solidarity the present chapter aims to contribute to avoiding these pitfalls.
Lenaerts K., EU Citizenship and the European Court of Justice’s ‘Stone-by-stone’ Approach, International Comparative Jurisprudence, 2015, 1, pp. 1-10.
Examining the seminal judgment of the European Court of Justice (the ‘ECJ’) in the Ruiz Zambrano case (C‐34/09, EU:C:2011:124) and its progeny, this paper is to illustrate the fact that in hard cases of constitutional importance the ECJ follows an incremental approach. This means, in essence, that the ECJ does not take ‘long jumps’ when expounding the rationale underpinning the solution given to novel questions of constitutional importance. On the contrary, the persuasiveness of its argumentative discourse is built up progres- sively, i.e., ‘stone-by-stone’.
Schnapper D., Metamorphoses in citizenship, Inflexions, 2011, Vol. 16, pp. 199-204.
When citizenship moves from the republican to the democratic model, the concern for equality in conditions outweighs the republican transcendency of the general will. When, however, democracies no longer understand what war is, they produce the danger of no longer being able to defend themselves and no longer being able to fight for peace.
Faist T., Social Citizenship in the European Union: Nested Membership, Journal of Common Market Studies, March 2001, Vol. 39, 1, pp. 37-58.
The ‘European social dimension’ offers a strategic entry point for analysing the development of citizenship in the European Union (EU). The first part of this contribution discusses the functions of social citizenship in this emerging multi-level governance network. Second, the analysis deals with two prominent and stylized paradigms that have sought to grasp the new multi ple-level quality of social citizenship in the EU: residual and post-national concepts of membership in liberal democracies and advanced welfare states. Although each of these approaches captures selected elements of social citizenship, they are unable to deal with rights and duties in multiple governance levels in a satisfactory way. Therefore, the discussion moves to an alternative concept – nested citizenship. This means that European citizenship is nested in various sites: regional, state and supra-state forms of citizenship function in complementary ways – while the associated norms, rules and institutions are subject to constant revision and further development on all governance levels. Third, the analysis shows that the concept of nested citizenship can help to overcome the fruitless dichotomy of Euro- optimism and Euro-pessimism concerning social policy and citizenship. This discussion suggests a conception of European social citizenship as a common project, evolving towards common present- and future-oriented understandings of substantial rights and democratic principles in the EU.
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