the Conclusion offers a synthesized treatment of the book’s empirical analysis by summarizing the various power relations that have underpinned citizenship politics over the more than half century old history of the EU project. We then return to a discussion of the post-referenda dynamics of EU integration that we started in this introductory chapter, reflecting on the implications that the EU’s current crisis of legitimacy have for the current configuration of power asymmetries that underpin citizenship politics. We conclude the book with a brief discussion of what constitutes the “model” or “ideal” EU citizen in the eyes of social and political forces at the heart of the integration project.
Notes
1. For detailed accounts of the efforts to secure popular support and legitimacy for European integration following in the wake of the Single Market transformations, see e.g. Hansen (2000); Shore (2000); Scott-Smith (2003); Martiniello (1995).
2. As was stipulated in the Maastricht Treaty (EC Treaty, Part Two, Article 8(1)), “Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union”. The rights provided by the “Citizenship of the Union” include, inter alia, “the right to move and reside within the territory of the Member States”; “the right to vote and to stand as a candidate” at municipal and European Parliament elections for residents in a member state other than the one where they are nationals; expanded diplomatic and consular protection; and “the right to petition the European Parliament” and to “apply to the Ombudsman” (Council of the European Communities, CEC 1992).
3. For a substantiation of this point, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the referenda, see Watkins (2005).
4. See CEC (2008a: 6). For more comprehensive EU migration statistics, covering both irregular and regular migration, see CEC (2008a: Annex 4). See also e.g. Eurostat (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/population/introduction); OECD (http://www.oecd.org/topic/0,3373,en_2649_37415_1_1_1_1_37415,00.html); and International Organization for Migration (IOM) (http://www.iom.int/jahia/jsp/index.jsp).
PART I
Theory and History of EU Citizenship
CHAPTER 1
Towards a Critical History
Introduction
The growing importance of citizenship within the EU political arena has been paralleled by a surge of academic interest in its subject matter (see e.g. Rosas and Antola 1995; Wiener 1998; Bellamy and Warleigh 2001; Bellamy, Castiglione and Shaw 2006; Maas 2007). What stands out within this wide-ranging, and ever-growing, body of literature has been the diverse range of social scientific fields, from philosophy and sociology to industrial relations and gender studies, that have grappled with the extension of EU supranational (or as some would have it “post-national”) competencies in the realm of citizenship, and the implications this has for contemporary European societies. Yet for all this diversity in disciplinary terms, the study of EU citizenship is still dominated heavily by a narrow set of theoretical frameworks which take the current political parameters of EU citizenship as given, either endorsing it as a progressive model or seeking to correct what are regarded to be more or less surmountable institutional deficiencies in citizenship practice. Drawing inspiration from van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner’s (2003) critique of mainstream integration theories, we argue here that although these approaches are not necessarily uninterested in issues of power and legitimacy, their very conceptual designs render them inherently unable to explain the contradictions between citizenship practice and principles of legitimacy which are at the heart of the EU’s currently unfolding legitimacy crisis (see Introduction).
Accessing these dynamics, we suggest, therefore requires that analyses of EU citizenship go beyond narrow concerns with normative prescription and institutional problem solving, and instead take up the central problématique that unites a varied set of approaches within the theoretical tradition of critical political economy: “to understand the nature of power in the EU, including its organization and distribution, and to access the implications of a given set of power relations for legitimacy” (van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner 2003: 17). In attempting to historically uncover the “social purpose” of EU integration, who benefits from it, and what kind of polity it seeks to promote, critical political economy has the potential to contribute unique insights describing not only how EU citizenship has been limited in securing legitimacy, but also to explain why this has been the case (Holman 2004; van Apeldoorn 2002). Essential to this explanatory critical-historical framework is the examination of capitalist market structures in engendering asymmetrical power relations, which crucially shape the content of citizenship politics.
To this point, however, save for a few book chapters and conference papers, there has been no systematic attempt to develop a critical political economy approach to EU citizenship. In this chapter we aim to begin filling this void in the literature by outlining the ways in which critical political economy contributes to our understandings of citizenship politics in the EU. In developing what we prefer to call a “critical history”—shorthand for this book’s application of critical political economy insights to the long-term history of citizenship in the EU since the early 1950s—the central purpose here is to intervene in the existing literature by rendering explicit the social purpose of EU citizenship within the EU as a hybrid, but nevertheless capitalist, form of statehood (Jessop 2002). Before proceeding to outline this alternative approach in detail, we begin by first fleshing out our conceptual critique of what we broadly identify as the predominant theoretical approaches to EU citizenship. Considering the enormous body of work already existing in this area, any attempt to review and critique this literature in its entirety within the space allocated here would tend toward caricature. We choose here to focus on the debates and issues surrounding two theoretical perspectives that we argue to be most significant in regards to EU citizenship: namely, the moral philosophical approach known as “post-national cosmopolitanism,” and the legalist-institutionalist approach with affinities to the “multilevel governance” approach to EU integration.
“Post-National Cosmopolitanism” and EU Citizenship
Is it desirable, or even possible, for legitimate and democratic citizenship to function outside the confines of the nation-state? Should EU citizenship be endorsed as the basis for a progressive post-national European identity? These are the main questions that have concerned approaches to EU citizenship falling within the moral philosophical tradition, which involves competing interpretations of the European “demos,” its possibilities, ethical implications, and consequences for traditional political concepts associated with the nation-state. By far the most influential theoretical perspective on EU citizenship within moral philosophy has been “post-national cosmopolitanism” (hereafter PNC), also referred to as “cosmopolitan democracy”.1 As a normative theoretical perspective located within the tradition of “Kantian-Habermasian critical theory” (Patomäki 2006: 116), PNC seeks to advance an academic and political project of an “international system based on the rule of law and democracy” and respect for universallyrecognized human rights (Archibugi and Koenig-Archibugi 2003: 273). PNC holds that in an era of “globalization,” defined as the “transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and power” (Held, interviewed by Guibernau 2001: 427), new
