Local Practices of European Citizenship in France

Thirty years after the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper aims to make a contribution to the empirical study of the development of European Citizenship, through the lens of mobile EU Citizens. Although only a small part of the EU population is estimated to have any experience of living and working in another Member-State, mobile EU Citizens occupy a position of symbolic importance at the vanguard of a potential European demos and are considered by some academics as the “pioneers of European integration”. The paper will investigate the question of the EU as a political space, and the social effects of European integration “from below”, from the perspective of “intra EU movers” and their political practices. To what extent do mobile EU citizens use their electoral rights? Do they have other channels of participation (petitions, associations, etc…)? How do they mobilize through social media? To answer such questions, the paper uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine the electoral mobilization patterns of mobile EU citizens during the 2020 campaign for municipal elections in France.