Citizenship and Solidarity in Crisis: Brexit and Beyond

Abstract

It has been twenty-five years since the concept of EU citizenship was formalised by the Treaty of Maastricht, but for the first time, the prospect that EU citizenship can be withdrawn has emerged. There are currently an estimated 3 million EU-born citizens living in the UK, and over 1 million UK nationals living in other EU member states. Brexit thus opens a Pandora’s box of EU citizenship and raises a number of normative questions: can EU citizenship be withdrawn, and if so, what does it tell us about EU citizenship? What are the implications for the UK and the remaining EU-27? Furthermore, proposals to offer associate citizenship to Brits living in the EU raises the question of whether EU citizenship can be detached from national citizenship. Brexit also creates inequalities in access to EU, national and dual citizenship, with those EU citizens currently excluded from accessing UK citizenship being disproportionately women. Furthermore, British citizens will have unequal rights to apply for citizenship of another EU member state, depending on their ancestry or residence status in other parts of the EU. However, EU citizenship is not just about economic rationality or legal rights, but about populations who have been socialised as EU citizens with awareness of a particular set of rights. On the one hand, Brexit gives rise to public debates about EU citizenship and raises the question of how far Brexit impacts on identification as EU citizens. On the other hand, opposition to the EU, anti-immigrant sentiment and rising xenophobia suggests the possibility of increasingly divided communities. Beyond political and legal conception of citizenship, then, the way in which these issues are understood and debated in the public sphere becomes relevant. The panel will deal with the challenges and questions about EU citizenship raised by Brexit from a variety of perspectives, including legal and political approaches, media and communication and sociology.