Jean Monnet Working Papers

The citizen is the “simple element of a polity”, as Aristotle once put it. Citizenship appears as a prolegomenon to other core questions concerning public policy and constitutionalism. In Europe today, we deal with a threefold concept of citizenship and we need to understand how it is built up in order to assess some recent trends in citizenship, third country national status and civic participation. More than fifteen years after the “complementary status” of European citizenship was introduced into the “Ufo” of the Union, we should ask what EU citizenship means today for the ongoing Europeanisation process of our societies. The thesis is that the three models today merging in EU citizenship can be accounted for by looking at the opposite of citizenry: By emphasizing inclusiveness, the sociological focus is on the marginalised subject, migration and asylum policies. Law and jurisprudence look at citizenship by trying to limit the numerous hard cases arising in a world of migration where the opposite of the citizen is still the alien. The political model holds the subject (sujet) in opposition to the citizen (citoyen), entailing problems related to the democratic quality of EU institutions. These different standards tend to overlap in the current debate and this engenders misunderstandings. The Lisbon Treaty should be addressed from this viewpoint: at what level do we find innovations and how can these be inserted into a coherent framework? As a result of the erosion of traditional nationality, we now face a legal patchwork, which produces an array of hard cases. Building on a strong philosophical tradition, I suggest a possible method for bridging these three standards and for highlighting the current ambiguities that EU citizenship has entailed for those living and working in Europe who lack the ius soli and ius sanguinis-based entitlement. By looking at the perspectives and the ambiguities of the EU citizenship status today, the aim is to shed new light on transnational citizenship-building. (