Negotiated citizenship: Four conceptualisations of post-EU citizenship in the Brexit negotiations

Brexit constitutes a major challenge to European citizenship. According to the Treaties, everybody who holds citizenship of a EU member state holds also EU citizenship. The logical implication would be that if a country were no longer a Member State, its citizens would not hold EU citizenship. At the same time, EU citizens who have been living in the UK would suddenly been deprived of their important EU citizenship status within the country they reside. The question is whether one can be deprived of his/her citizenship overnight, and whether EU citizenship would not imply that (certain) EU citizenship rights can be considered indefinitely ‘acquired’. The Brexit negotiations answered these questions. British citizens are indeed deprived of their EU citizenship, while EU citizenship does no longer provide protection for EU citizens in the UK. However, the Withdrawal Agreement provides an important, although not comprehensive, protection for EU citizens already living in the UK and British citizens already living in the rest of the EU. Their status moves from EU citizenship to ‘negotiated citizenship’. The paper will first focus on this particular status of ‘negotiated citizenship’ as one reciprocally defined in international negotiations. The paper then further analyzes how citizenship was conceptualised during the negotiations. The first striking finding, in fact, is that the concept of (European) citizenship was hardly used during the negotiations. Yet, this does not mean that the negotiations did not imply particular conceptualisations of citizenship. I distinguish between four conceptualisations of citizenship that have predominantly framed the approaches of different actors in the Brexit negotiations; namely citizenship as being an exclusively national concept; acquired EU citizenship; reciprocal transnational citizenship; and citizenship as a bargaining chip. I analyse how these conceptualisations have appeared at different stages in the negotiation process and by different policy actors, being the UK and EU negotiators and policy-makers, and civil society actors. The analysis is based on close collaboration of the author with the3million association, the main association representing EU residents in the UK, in their advocacy work during the Brexit negotiations.