The Right to Move. Perspectives on Transnational Citizenship in the EU

Abstract

The EU is frequently considered to be a laboratory experimenting on how to transform transnational citizenship into a reality. EU citizenship, whilst not supposed to substitute for national citizenship (still being based on national citizenship in a member state of the EU), nevertheless encapsulates an expansive effect which due to its transformative character changes the relation between European and national citizenship. The core of EU citizenship is mobility rights based on the four freedoms, including freedom of movement for persons. Civic inclusion is potentially detached from national affiliation. But freedom of movement for persons has recently become the target of Eurosceptic politicization and has played a critical role in election campaigns and referenda. The panel invites reflections on the challenges of transnational citizenship under the double focus of shifting boundaries: territorially and socially. Territorially, EU citizenship in principle enlarges access to rights and establishes – democratic shortcomings notwithstanding – practices of justification that transcend the limits of national, territorially bounded communities. On the other hand, EU citizenship tends to disaggregate the different dimensions of citizenship which as civil, political and social rights have been closely combined in the national constellation. Thus it reintroduces the dependence of political and social status which democratic welfare states have been aiming to overcome. Does EU citizenship therefore contribute to increasing the latent social gap between “movers” and “stay-at homers”, between those who – according to the hypothesis of a new “globalization cleavage” – profit form mobility and those who experience it as a burden? Does EU citizenship contribute to overcoming territorial boundaries while introducing new, social ones?