Special Workshop Abstract

Kaarlo Tuori

The background to the introduction of EU citizenship through the Maastricht Treaty lies in the two developments which have been called constitutionalization and Europeanization. In the process of constitutionalization, EC law has, allegedly, become an independent legal order, with its Constitution confirmed in the Treaties and in the jurisprudence of the ECJ. At the same time, direct legal relations between then individuals and the Community have been established. The process of Europeanization has been manifested by, primarily, the enlargement of the competences of the Community (and later the EU) and the introduction of majoritarian decision-making.  Constitutionalization and Europeanization, taken together, have led to what many observers have termed a legitimacy deficit.

Citizenship can be analysed as a three-place relationship between the individual (the citizen), the community of citizens and the polity. In this relationship, the citizen appears as a bearer of specific rights and duties. Citizenship rights are participatory rights, which can only be exercised jointly with other citizens. In a democratic nation-state, the citizenry also constitutes the demos of democracy. If the demos is defined through the notion of the nation, there seems to be three main alternative interpretations: a civic one, a cultural one and an ethnic one. From a normative point of view, the first alternative is to be preferred. An empirical question is whether citizenship practices are in themselves sufficient for the emergence of such a democratic political and legal culture which can create the bonds of allegiance, necessary for the demos, or whether they are in need of support from pre-political ties of community.  As regards the polity as the third term in the relation of citizenship, our present conceptions have been shaped in the context of the modern democratic nation-state. However, citizenship may exist and has existed in other types of polity, too.

EU citizenship is not only complementary to but even parasitic on the citizenship of the Member States. The citizenship rights explicitly laid down in the TEC and in the Charter of the Fundamental Rights are quite meagre as to both their contents and their scope. However, in their citizenship practices, EU citizens do not rely merely on these rights but also, and even primarily, on those guaranteed by their national constitutions, in conjunction with the corresponding provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, such as the co-called political fundamental rights, i.e., freedoms of expression, assembly and association. For the major part, citizenship practices, though aiming at influencing the political opinion and will formation at the level of the EU, have their locus in the communicative and associative networks of the public sphere and civil society of the Member States; the citizenship rights of the nation-states also serve the citizenship practices of the EU. Thus, the future of EU citizenship depends not only on the emergence of a unifying political and legal culture (a European Verfassungspatriotismus), as well as a common European public sphere  and civil society, but also on the vigour of the cultural and sociological prerequisites of the democratic Rechtsstaat in the Member States. The peculiar interlocked relation of the EU to the Member States also concerns EU citizenship, in both its “thin” legal and “thicker” cultural and sociological sense.