This paper explores an International Political Economy (IPE) approach to understanding European Union (EU) citizenship and determines how migration within an integrated regional market affects migrants‘ citizenship practices and behaviours. IPE scholars often argue that the dynamics of globalisation have subordinated the state and politics to economic considerations and regional markets (Talani, 2010). Citizenship studies suggest that the same dynamics have created a new citizenship model, which is characterised by a weak socio-economic membership of an integrated region (Everson and Preuss, 1995). This paper uses the concept of market citizenship to shed light on EU citizenship, the only example of regional citizenship in the world today. The extant literature on EU citizenship tends to take one of two opposing approaches. The first approach focuses on modern citizenship within European states (Bellamy, 2008; Warleigh 1998), which seems to ignore the fact that EU citizenship confers rights on individuals beyond member-state borders. The second approach goes too far the other way. It considers the concept of EU citizenship from a more cosmopolitan viewpoint (Havel, 1998), according it a global instead of merely a regional status (Kostakopoulou, 2007). In this fashion, both approaches lead to the same conclusion: EU citizenship is merely =pie in the sky‘ (D‘Oliveira, 1995). Yet, survey data suggests that the status of EU citizenship has substantial meaning for a sizeable minority of the EU‘s population (Eurobarometer, 2010).The paper considers both conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding the characteristics of EU citizenship. It first examines EU citizenship‘s multi-level nature—embracing both transnational and various national sets of rights and obligations—and how this interacts with other factors (e.g. age) (Yuval-Davis, 2010). Transnational market citizenship is defined as a combination of various elements, including member state citizenship (Bellamy, 2008), mobility, tolerance, new forms of political action and cognitive sophistication (Dalton, 2009; Ingelhart, 1970). Finally, the paper explores the actual experiences of migrant EU citizens, through an analysis of quantitative evidence from Eurobarometer and European Social Survey.
