Thèright to Have Rights': Citizenship Practice and the Political Constitution of the European Union Esrc " One Europe or Several? " Programme

The ESRC " One Europe or Several? " Programme publishes Working Papers to make research results, accounts of work in progress and background information available to those concerned with contemporary European issues. The Programme also publishes Policy Papers (ISSN 1468-4152) listed at the end of this publication. The Programme does not express opinions of its own; the views expressed in this publication are the responsibility of the author/s. and audiences in Leeds, Pisa and Vienna for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. 3 INTRODUCTION European Union citizenship is defined and frequently analysed in terms of the entitlements and potential obligations it bestows on beneficiaries of this status (for example, O'Leary 1996, Lyons 1996). So conceived, citizenship becomes an epiphenomenon of how Europe is or might be constituted according to certain analytical typologies or ideal conceptions of capitalism, socialism and democracy. The main controversies surround its restriction to member state nationals, its relationship to national citizenship, and the various packages of rights and duties that citizens have or might receive under differing visions of Europe as either a pure free market, a form of supranational social market democracy, a new kind of transnational community and so on. The focus is on enumerating and either extending or limiting access and rights in order to classify or move Europe towards a given socioeconomic and political model. Even those who characterise European citizenship as novel tend to see it in terms of the ways globalisation, or a global theory of justice, have, or could, produce an additional layer of supranational rights and obligations or even herald a cosmopolitan political order EU citizenship was designed to bring the Union closer to ordinary people and provide it with the popular legitimacy that the post-Maastricht debates subsequently confirmed it sorely lacked. However, citizenship consists of more than passive acceptance of a pre-constituted package of rights. As Joseph Weiler has pointedly remarked, `you could create rights and afford judicial remedies to slaves' (Weiler, 1999: 336). What these accounts overlook is the independent role citizenship plays in the very constitution of a polity through citizens formulating, deliberating upon, and disputing different views of justice and rights. This alternative view conceives citizenship as`the right to have rights' rather than as a given set of rights. 1 1 I borrow this phrase and some of the inspiration behind my argument from Lefort, 1988: 37, who takes it in turn …