Renationalized Europe in the EU Migration Crisis: Differentiated Citizenship and Exclusion

The several crises that the European Union has undergone since 2008 have rendered explicit the problematic character of the key concepts and categories with which both European law and international law have tended to characterise personal statuses. The migration crisis is especially important in this regard. European citizenship came to be moulded in the 1990s and 2000s as a new form of citizenship, which promised a form of belonging that transcended narrow national identity. This normative concept and political idea was furthermore clearly based on a notion of supranational citizenship as equal citizenship. In other words, the European idea of citizenship beyond the nation-state was exactly that the inequality of citizenship between nation-states could be battled through European norms and principles. In reacting to the migration crisis, the tide may however have turned. Domestic reactions have arguably gone down the road of renationalization and a rekindling of the idea of bounded, national citizenship that needs to be "protected" against outside influence. European reactions mainly in the form of new policy packages and legislative reforms in the Common European Asylum Policy (CEAS) that will restrict for instance the free movement of refugees on EU territory. This paper discusses these developments to ask whether we are entering a new phase of European politics where differentiated citizenship as well as a differentiation of personal statuses of non-EU citizens become the norm.