What does citizenship mean in the European context?
What does citizenship mean in the European context?
Citizenship, broadly speaking, entails liberties, rights or entitlements and duties; and it involves the sense of 'belonging' that is also necessary to full membership of a political community
Though nationality and citzenship may overlap ideologically, a recent survey of twelve member states of the EU(Gardner, ed., 1997; see also Qvortrup and Hazell, 1998 on the Nordic League) shows that, in practice, it is not the case that all citizenship rights are reserved for nationals. There is, however, no wholly uniform pattern about which rights are extended by states to resident 'neighbours' from other countries - or duties imposed on them.
Rights to vote in General Elections are largely reserved to nationals - as in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. But Irish nationals resident in the UK have always been eligible to vote in British General Elections and British nationals in Ireland have been able to do so since 1985. This restriction also applies in the same countries, plus Ireland, to eligibility to be a candidate. Prior to the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty, non-nationals were allowed, however, to vote and stand in local elections in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain [in limited circumstances], and the UK [Irish and Commonwealth nationals]. Now, member states with basic nationality restrictions make exceptions for resident other EC nationals (as they do for elections to, and standing for, the European Parliament). In eight countries where referendums are permitted, the right to vote is not restricted to nationals in Denmark and Germany. In ten countries with petition rights, they are extended to all residents, except in Italy and Spain. With certain restrictions, nationals and non-nationals have rights to assembly and to form associations in all twelve countries.
In none of the twelve countries surveyed is access to the courts barred by nationality but they vary as to whether non-nationals are entitled to legal aid and there are differences over the jurisdiction of the courts. Free movement rights, originally different, are increasingly similar as a result of the European Convention on Human Rights [except in Greece, Spain and the UK] and, in the EU, this will become more so as the Amsterdam Treaty is implemented [except in relation to the UK and Ireland vis a vis the rest of the EU and, possibly Denmark]. Rights to social security are generally based on employment status or residence, not nationality, frequently covering both EU and non-EU nationals under reciprocal agreements such as those in the Nordic League and between Ireland and the UK. With respect to the duties of citizenship, jury and military service generally depend on nationality but not in the case of stateless persons in France and Italy, or asylum beneficiaries in France, civil defence in Denmark, and compulsory public service in Germany. The duty to pay taxes is, of course, not confined to nationals - which could be said to flout the old adage, 'no taxation without representation'.
In those states where, before Maastricht, eligibility rested on residence, rights were, and are, usually available to non-national residents from outside the EU; so-called 'third country nationals' A survey of five ethnic minority groups in five EU member states shows that most respondents [some having the nationality of the host country, some dual nationals and some long-term residents] believe that they have access to a satisfactory range of legal, political and social rights (Smith and Wistrech, 1998). But there are exceptions - which must be a matter of concern if citizenship is a normative practice and not a synonym for nationality.
Indeed, the Amsterdam Treaty may encourage this. The same survey, however, also shows that substantial proportions of all five ethnic minorities have experienced racial threats and abuse which undermine their sense of security and belonging. This finding was strongest in Germany, the UK, Belgium and France and lowest in the Netherlands. The survey did not include Ireland but, increasingly, there is a similar problem there too. Racism was reported as more likely to be displayed by fellow citizens than by institutions, except the police and courts. The 'policing' measures vis a vis migrants seeking to cross the EU's external borders, which protect free movement within it, are argued to be reinforcing the sense that such people are undesirable by 'securitizing' the issue of immigration (Kostakopoulou, 1998).
socio-economic inequalities are irrelevant to a libertarian conception of citizenship; indeed, compensating for them would be detrimental to the rights of other citizens. This view is strongest in the United States of America, though there are traces of it in England, not only as a result of the advent of Thatcherism,
Education
Economic differences within and between countries are accompanied by differential access to education (Dunford and Hudson, 1996, p. 29). Though there is little difference among EU member states and between them and prospective members in adult literacy and only slightly more in terms of school enrollment (1995 figures used by Rosati, 1998, p. 7), there are differences within the EU over access to further education and training. For example, less than 40 per cent of young people in Portugal are (or were a decade ago) in apprenticeships, training or non-university education and more than 85 per cent in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. In the lagging regions within states the maximum was 60 per cent.
The introduction of Citizenship understood in its classical vocabulary could mean, then, a change in the very telos of European Integration from peoples of Europe to a people of Europe, even if in a federalist context. With the change of the Telos, would commence a process which would eventually result in a change of European identity and the identity of citizens in Europe, who would become, not only formally, but in their consciousness European citizens.
European citizenship, on this view (still quite prevalent) is to people, what EMU is to currencies. To some -- both Europhiles and Euroskeptics -- this is exactly what European Citizenship is about. It should not surprise us that both Europhiles and Euroskeptics can hold a similar view of what European Citizenship is about. We have long understood that often the debate between these two extremes is not a debate of opposites but of equals -- equals in their inability to understand political and social organization in non Statal, national terms. In their political imagination, those closest in their views to the likes of, say, the right wing of the British Tories, are the Eurofederalists. It was hugely fitting and exquisitely right that Margaret Thatcher launched her famous attack on Europe at the College of Europe in Bruges. She and her audience shared the very same vocabulary even if using it in opposite directions. (It is not surprising, too, that on this view, those opposed to a European currency are also opposed to European citizenship.)
It would be changing because of a change in the understanding of the State and the nation, but also, perhaps, because of a change in our self-understanding and our understanding of the self and its identity.
Think of the linguistic trio Identity, Identical, Identify. Surely no self is identical to another. It is trite to recall that identity - in an age where for long Choice has replaced Fate as the foundation for self-understanding is a political and social construct which privileges one (or one set) of characteristics over all other, calls on the self to identify with that, and is then posited as identity.
It is equally trite to recall that the modern self has considerable problems with the move from Identical to Identity to Identify. Would it not be more accurate, in relation to the Self today, to talk of DIFFERENTITY?
Do not, pray, confuse what I am talking about with Multiculturalism. Whether in the USA or Hungary the labeling of people as black, or Whitemale, or Jew et cetera as a basis for group political entitlement is the celebration of a bureaucratically sanctioned polity of "multi-cultural" groups composed of mono-culturally identified individuals - the antithesis of individual differentity.
Likewise, the introduction of a European Citizenship could constitute an attempt to construct and reflect a recognition of fragmented Sovereignty in the sense so impressively and lucidly developed by Neal McCormick and of the porous State in that truly original sense that Christian Joerges developed: The State without a Market, to which we could add a State without a boundary and a its own defense - i.e. a State which constitutionally cannot even pretend to have control over the two of its classical functions: Provision of material and existential security.
Constructing, then a new concept of ...
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Likewise, the introduction of a European Citizenship could constitute an attempt to construct and reflect a recognition of fragmented Sovereignty in the sense so impressively and lucidly developed by Neal McCormick and of the porous State in that truly original sense that Christian Joerges developed: The State without a Market, to which we could add a State without a boundary and a its own defense - i.e. a State which constitutionally cannot even pretend to have control over the two of its classical functions: Provision of material and existential security.
Constructing, then a new concept of Citizenship around the Fragmented sovereignty of the State and the Fractured Self of the individuals who comprise those "States" - Citizenship as a hall mark of Differentity - could have been a fitting project for Union architect as we slouch towards the end of the decade (and the Century, and even the Millennium - though even counting that way is about a particular identity. That would be the major challenge to the conceptualization of European Citizenship. This, naturally, has not been part of the Post-Maastricht political debate.
In Western, liberal democracies public authority requires legitimation through one principal source: The citizens of the polity. The principal hallmark of citizenship is not the enjoyment of human rights-- though that may be part of the citizenship package. We pride ourselves that we extend human rights to visitors, aliens and the like. The deepest, most clearly engraved hallmark of citizenship in our democracies is that in citizens vests the power, by majority, to create binding norms, to shape the socio-economic direction of the polity, in fact, all those powers and capacities which, I believe, the Union now has. The institutions and mechanisms of democracy are the repository of primary citizenship rights
The first big question which citizenship gives rise to is to find the mechanisms to assert the linkages between citizens and the exercise of public authority. Absent those linkages, public authority loses its legitimacy. Thus, absent European citizens there is a serious problem of legitimate authority which the celebrated constitutionalization accentuates.
Lawyers recite dutifully that the
Community constitutes a new legal order ... for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and the subjects of which comprise not only Member States but also their nationals. Independently of the legislation of Member States, Community law therefore not only imposes obligations on individuals but is also intended to confer upon them rights which become part of their legal heritage. (Van Gend en Loos)
Habitually we celebrate the fact the obligations among States created by a Treaty confer rights on individuals which courts must protect, even against States. It is in this sense that calling individuals subjects of the Treaty alongside Member States may be justified. Subjects sounds awfully like citizens
One paradox, then, of European Constitutionalism has been that it created a new, non-international, constitutionally oriented legal order in the effect of its norms, but avoided a necessary component of legitimation in the creation of the norms -- citizenship. It is not that one has to exclude all norm making authority and legitimating power to States as such. After all, in all federations, States or their equivalent, form part of the legitimation at the federal level. But there must, likewise, be direct legitimation by citizens -- de jure or de facto -- at the union level.
Establishing European Citizenship would, thus it seems, be one necessary step to resolving that legitimation deficit. Vesting that concepts with attributes, mechanisms or instruments that manifest, in a manner not mediated through national, Statal institutions, the attributes of citizenship will be the other
Citizenship is not only about the politics of public authority. It is also about the social reality of peoplehood and the identity of the polity.
Citizens constitute the demos of the polity -- citizenship is frequently, though not necessarily, conflated with nationality. This, then, is the other, collective side, of the citizenship coin. Demos, provides another way of expressing the link between citizenship and democracy. Democracy does not exist in a vacuum. It is premised on the existence of a polity with members -- the demos -- by whom and for whom democratic discourse with its many variants takes place. The authority and legitimacy of a majority to compel a minority exists only within political boundaries defined by a demos. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no democracy.
But this, in turn, raises the other big dilemma of citizenship: Who are to be the citizens of the European polity? How are we to define the relationships among them. A demos, a people cannot, after all be a bunch of strangers. How should we understand, then, and define the peoplehood of the European demos if we insist that the task remains the ... ever closer union among the peoples of Europe?
One way to reconcile is denial -- by rejecting the notion of a European demos. The implications of this No Demos thesis, espoused, among others, by the German Constitutional Court, is to deny any meaningful democratization of the Union at the European level, to reassert the implicit underpinning of the Community legal order in international law, and if one is to be intellectually consistent, to negate likewise any meaningful content to European Citizenship. Space does not permit full elaboration[2]but a few hints will suffice.
Under this view, the nation, which is the modern expression of demos, constitutes the basis for the modern democratic State: The nation and its members constitute the polity for the purposes of accepting the discipline of democratic, majoritarian governance. Both descriptively and prescriptively (how it is and how it ought to be) a minority will/should accept the legitimacy of a majority decision because both majority and minority are part of the same demos, belong to the nation. That is an integral part of what rule-by-the-people, democracy, means on this reading. Thus, nationality constitutes the state (hence nation-state) which in turn constitutes its political boundary. The significance of the political boundary is not only to the older notion of political independence and territorial integrity, but also to the very democratic nature of the polity. A parliament is, on this view, an institution of democracy not only because it provides a mechanism for representation and majority voting, but because it represents the nation, the demos from which derive the authority and legitimacy of its decisions. To drive this point home, imagine an anschluss between - this time -- Germany and Denmark. Try and tell the Danes that they should not worry since they will have full representation in the Bundestag. Their screams of grief will be shrill not simply because they will be condemned, as Danes, to permanent minorityship (that may be true for the German Greens too), but because the way nationality, in this way of thinking, enmeshes with democracy is that even majority rule is only legitimate within a demos, when Danes rule Danes.
Turning to Europe, it is argued as a matter of empirical observation that there is no European demos -- not a people not a nation. Neither the subjective element (the sense of shared collective identity and loyalty) nor the objective conditions which could produce these (the kind of homogeneity of the organic national-cultural conditions on which peoplehood depend such as shared culture, a shared sense of history, a shared means of communication(!) exist. Long term peaceful relations with thickening economic and social intercourse should not be confused with the bonds of peoplehood and nationality forged by language, history, ethnicity and all the rest.
For some the problem is temporal. Although there is no demos now the possibility for the future is not precluded a-priori. For others, the very prospect of a European demos is undesirable. It is argued (correctly in my view) that integration is not about creating a European nation or people, but about the ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe.
The consequences of the No Demos thesis for the European construct are interesting. The rigorous implication of this view would be that absent a demos, there cannot, by definition, be a democracy or democratization at the European level. This is not a semantic proposition. On this reading, European democracy (meaning a minimum binding majoritarian decision-making at the European level) without a demos is no different from the previously mentioned German-Danish anschluss except on a larger scale. Giving the Danes a vote in the Bundestag is, as argued, ice cold comfort. Giving them a vote in the European Parliament or Council is, conceptually, no different. This would be true for each and every nation-state. European integration, on this view, may have involved a certain transfer of state functions to the Union but this has not been accompanied by a redrawing of political boundaries which can occur only if, and can be ascertained only when, a European people can be said to exist. Since this, it is claimed, has not occurred, the Union and its institutions can have neither the authority nor the legitimacy of a Demos-cratic State. Empowering the European Parliament is no solution and could -- to the extent that it weakens the Council (the voice of the Member States) -- actually exacerbate the legitimacy problem of the Community. On this view, a parliament without a demos is conceptually impossible, practically despotic. If the European Parliament is not the representative of a people, if the territorial boundaries of the EU do not correspond to its political boundaries, than the writ of such a parliament has only slightly more legitimacy than the writ of an emperor.
What, however, if the interests of the nation-state would be served by functional cooperation with other nation-states? The No Demos thesis has an implicit and traditional solution: Cooperation through international treaties, freely entered into by High Contracting Parties, preferably of a contractual nature (meaning no-open ended commitments) capable of denunciation, covering well-circumscribed subjects. Historically, such treaties were concluded by heads of state embodying the sovereignty of the nation-state. Under the more modern version, such treaties are concluded by a government answerable to a national parliament often requiring parliamentary approval and subject to the material conditions of the national democratic constitution. Democracy is safeguarded in that way.
And citizenship? Citizenship on this view must remain in the exclusive domain of the Member States through whose authority the Community and Union may function with legitimacy
Consider first Article 8 itself.
(1) Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union.
Although the Citizenship Chapter and its Article 8 are part of the Community Pillar, the citizenship established is, supposedly, Union citizenship. It would be strange if Community nationals would be citizens of the Community but not of the Union. After all, it was the move from Community to Union which was to mark the TEU. But the prevailing view among Member States at least, is that the Union, as such, has no legal personality. How can one be a citizen of an entity which has no legal personality? This might be seem a quibble with no consequences. Consider, however, the following.
Article 8 continues:
2. Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights conferred by this Treaty and shall be subject to the duties imposed thereby.
In a system based on the Rule of Law rights and duties are, for the most part, backed by judicial enforcement. The High Contracting Parties of the TEU, however, excluded as far as they could the jurisdiction of the Court from the Pillars 2 and, significantly, Pillar 3. On one view this means that no rights and duties are imposed on individuals outside the Community Pillar or, that whatever rights and duties were created, would not, in the intention of the States, be enforceable.
The impression of at least a measure of cynicism in this respect is suggested by the following. Article 8d provides a couple of the rights to be enjoyed by Union citizens.
Every citizen of the Union shall have the right to petition the European Parliament in accordance with Article 138d. Every citizen of the Union may apply to the Ombudsman established in accordance with Article 138e.
We already noted that the right of petition pre-dated the TEU. So it was just a matter of reassigning a name. But when we turn to the text of Articles 138d and 138e, we find that in the first place, the rights, even of petition and a complaint against maladministration, are restricted to matters
which comes within the Community's fields of activity
as if the citizen cannot be directly harmed by maladministration of, say, some aspects covered in Pillar 3, and, in the second place, that one could hardly qualify these two rights as specific citizens' right for, after all, appropriately, they belong not only to citizens, but, in the language of the provision itself, to
any natural or legal person residing or having its registered office in a Member State of the Community.
It is not that fundamental human rights, even basic political rights, cannot be part of the legal patrimony enjoyed by citizens in their capacity as human beings, but why then spell them out here as if they introduce something new or something peculiar to citizenship, when it transpires that part of their attractiveness is the fact that they are considered universal. One cannot escape the feeling that the drafters were desperately looking for some relatively easy, and non-consequential "ballast" for the ill defined and ill thought citizenship Chapter.
There is nothing easy or non consequential in another citizenship right -- the right to move freely within the Union. Article 8a provides in its first part that
Every citizen of the Union shall have the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States
This would be significant in that it could reflect and constitute a sense of that much vaunted beloningness which is so prominent in current official thinking. But, apparently, the High Contracting Parties appreciated this consequentialness and thus we find the notorious sequel:
subject to the limitations and conditions laid down in this Treaty and by the measures adopted to give it effect.
The Treaty, at the time, limited that right to individuals not in their capacity as human being, let alone citizens, but in their capacity as factors of production, part of the four fundamental economic freedoms, important, but hardly the stuff of citizenship. We have already noted the terse and scathing judgment of the Commission as to the measures which were to give effect to this provision.
Much emphasis is placed, in both Commission and Council Reports on the evolutive nature of the concept as indicated in Article 8e. But here too one cannot avoid the uneasy feeling of a mealy mouthed commitment. Any such extension will require unanimity -- increasingly difficult in a Community of fifteen, the European Parliament -- on a matter of citizenship, note -- will only be consulted, and to cap it, the decision -- a mere recommendation -- will require constitutional ratification by the Member States. The prospects for deepening the notion of European citizenship could not be all that high.
The reason I favour the hypothesis of a cynical public relations exercise in construing the notion of Citizenship which the TEU supposedly established is that the alternative is even a worse hypothesis -- an unbelievably impoverished view of the very meaning of citizenship and its principal components. Can one credit that the hodgepodge of relatively trivial civic artifacts in Article 8 was believed by any serious official or statesman or stateswoman to capture what European citizenship should be about? A citizenship composed of -- the right to complain to an ombudsman or petition the relatively impotent European Parliament (provided the complaint concerns a matter "... which affects him, her or it directly") and with no guarantee of outcome; the right to consular help in foreign countries in which your own Member State has no representation as if reciprocal arrangements are not already in place as any seasoned traveler will know; and the right of non-residents to vote for the European Parliament or local authorities? Does not Article 8 look awfully like one of those Carnets of "free attractions" some tourist authorities distribute to visitors to make them feel welcome and which you accept in the knowledge that the coupons are free because the attractions are not attractive? Article 8a-8d are all important in their own little way but so marginal and remote from the core of citizenship. The only significant measure, free movement and the right to residence, a measure which could connote a double sense of belonging, turned out to be a chimera. And the promise of future developments, contingent on such procedural difficulties as to make it illusory.
One has to believe that the High Contracting Parties understood the fundamental nature of citizenship in redefining the nature of the Union -- and it is this understanding, rather than misunderstanding which lead them to the desultory Article 8.
But why, then, open Pandora's box at all?
It is the current Commission's input to the Reflection Group which gives us, inadvertently perhaps, the interpretative key. In the eyes of the Commission the two key values which make Union Citizenship most worthy and, thus, worth developing to the full are: a. that citizenship reinforces and renders more tangible the individual's sentiment of belonging to the Union; and b. that citizenship confers on the individual citizen rights which tie him to the Union.[5] Something was going amiss in the public relations of the Union. Maybe citizenship would be an answer?
That the citizen belongs to the Union is, perhaps, a sentiment important to instill. But even accepting the dubious assumption of the desirability of grafting a national type citizenship ethos on to the Community, surely, even more important is to render tangible, through the concept of citizenship and its manifestations, that it is the Union that belongs to the citizen? But you will look in vain to Article 8 for meaningful instruments to render tangible or instill ownership over rather than belonging to. Likewise, rights are surely important, but in the classic discourse of citizenship surely duties, the things the polity asks of its members, are as critical as that which it gives them. The demands of loyalty (not blind, to be sure), of service even, yes, of sacrifice, are as fixed a hallmark of citizenship as are rights. But, although, Article 8 mentions duties these remain mysterious and none are listed. And whereas the Council, to an even greater degree the Commission and especially, Parliament, are lavish in their clamour for more and more rights, the language of duty and service let alone loyalty are muted at best -- Parliament does suggest some European Peace Corps equivalent -- and for the most part absent altogether.
What, then, is the culture, what is the ethos which underlie phrases such as this: [L]'instauration du concept de citoyenneté ... vise à approfondir et rendere plus tangible le sentiment d'appartenance du citoyen européen à l'Union européenne, en lui conférant des droits qui lui soient liés (Commission) or `Rapprocher l'Europe du citoyen' est aparu nécessaire, au fil des années et particuliérement lors du récent débat public sur la ratification du TUE, pour renforcer l'adhésion des citoyens à la construction européenne (Council) and others like them? What is the culture and ethos which explain a concept of citizenship which, for example, speaks of duties but lists none?
At best it represents a failure of the imagination. An inability to think of citizenship in any terms other than those resulting from the culture of the State and the Nation. And thus we are treated to a dispiriting kind of Euro NewSpeak: Vehement denials by all and sundry of the Statal or nation-building character of the Union whilst, at the same time, appealing to Statal and/or national understandings of citizenship and expecting it to provide emotional and psychological attachments -- beloningness -- which are typical of those very constructs which are denied.
There is a worse, even more dispiriting interpretation to the Citizenship discourse in Maastricht and in the run up to IGC 96. What is the political culture which underlies the discourse of beloningness so much sought after. Is it the discourse of civic responsibility and consequent political attachment at all? Or is it not closer to a market culture and the ethos of consumerism? Is it an unacceptable caricature to think of this discourse as giving expression to an ethos according to which the Union has become a product for which the managers, alarmed by customer dissatisfaction, are engaged in brand development. Citizenship and the Arights" associated with it are meant to give the product a new image (since it adds very little in substance) and make the product ever more attractive to its consumers, to reestablish their attachment to their favourite brand. Mine is not an anti-market view, the importance of which to European prosperity is acknowledged. But it is a view which is concerned with the degradation of the political process, of image trumping substance, of deliberative governance being replaced by a commodification of the political process, of consumer replacing the citizen, of a Saatchi & Saatchi or Forza Europa Europe.
What, then, should or could be done?
Despite its centrality to the notion of democracy and political legitimacy, there is something inherently troubling in the introduction of citizenship to the Union lexicon. We have already seen that in substance Article 8 was an empty gesture. On this reading, its significance must be seen at the symbolic level. For some, it could be the symbolism of accountability and democracy. But then, why so empty? There is another possibility. In its rhetoric Maastricht appropriated the deepest symbols of statehood: citizenship, defense, foreign policy -- the rhetoric of a superstate. We all know that all three are the emptiest and weakest provisions of the Treaty, but at the symbolic level do they undermine the ethics of supranationalism? Supranationalism is a move away from statism to a new uneasy relationship between Community and Member States. Indeed, Community was a fine word to capture that value. Now the operational rhetoric is Union, not Community. We have come full circle. The deep irony is that the full circle has come on the ideological level alone. In the way it related to individuals, supranationalism was about the diminution of nationality as a referent for transnational intercourse. But, on this reading, under the rhetoric of the TEU, the Us is no longer Germans or French or Italians and the Them is no longer British, or Dutch or Irish. The Us has become European and the Them, non-European. If Europe embraces so earnestly at the symbolic level European citizenship, simply defining a new other on what moral ground can one turn against French National Fronts, German Republicans and their brethren elsewhere who embrace Member State nationalism. On the ground that they chose the wrong nationalism which to embrace?
This unease would be particularly justified if the understanding of European citizenship were to embrace that strand in European political thought and praxis which a: understands nationality in the organic terms of culture and language and religion (and ethnicity); and b. conflates nationality and citizenship so that nationality is a condition for citizenship and citizenship means nationality. Why, then, not advocate, realistically or otherwise, the elimination of the concept of European citizenship? It is, I think, because in European citizenship, understood as vehicle for identity, there is, strangely, immense promise.
How so?
Is it mandated, we should ask, that demos in general and the European demos in particular be understood exclusively in organic cultural homogeneous terms? Can we not break away from that tradition and define membership of a polity in civic, non-organic-cultural terms? Can we not imagine a polity whose demos is defined, understood and accepted in civic, non-organic-cultural terms, and would have legitimate rule-making democratic authority on that basis? A demos understood in non-organic civic terms, a coming together on the basis not of shared ethnos and/or organic culture, but a coming together on the basis of shared values, a shared understanding of rights and societal duties and shared rational, intellectual culture which transcend organic-national differences. Consider in this light again Article 8 and see its latent promise.
Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union [...]
As mentioned, the introduction of citizenship to the conceptual world of the Union could be seen as just another step in the drive towards a Statal, unity vision of Europe, especially if citizenship is understood as being premised on statehood. But there is another more tantalizing and radical way of understanding the provision, namely as the very conceptual decoupling of nationality from citizenship and as the conception of a polity the demos of which, its membership, is understood in the first place in civic and political rather than ethno-cultural terms. On this view, the Union belongs to, is composed of, citizens who by definition do not share the same nationality. The substance of membership (and thus of the demos) is in a commitment to the shared values of the Union as expressed in its constituent documents, a commitment, inter alia, to the duties and rights of a civic society covering discrete areas of public life, a commitment to membership in a polity which privileges exactly the opposites of nationalism -- those human features which transcend the differences of organic ethno-culturalism. On this reading, the conceptualization of a European demos should not be based on real or imaginary trans-European cultural affinities or shared histories nor on the construction of a European "national" myth of the type which constitutes the identity of the organic nation. European citizenship should not be thought of either as intended to create the type of emotional attachments associated with nationality based citizenship. The decoupling of nationality and citizenship opens the possibility, instead, of thinking of co-existing multiple demoi.
One view of multiple demoi may consist in what may be called the "concentric circles" approach. On this approach one feels simultaneously as belonging to, and being part of, say, Germany and Europe; or, even, Scotland, Britain and Europe. What characterizes this view is that the sense of identity and identification derives from the same sources of human attachment albeit at different levels of intensity. Presumably the most intense (which the nation, and State, always claims to be) would and should trump in normative conflict.
The view of multiple demoi which I am suggesting, one of truly variable geometry, invites individuals to see themselves as belonging simultaneously to two demoi, based, critically, on different subjective factors of identification. I may be a German national in the in-reaching strong sense of organic-cultural identification and sense of belongingness. I am simultaneously a European citizen in terms of my European transnational affinities to shared values which transcend the ethno-national diversity. So much so, that in the a range of areas of public life, I am willing to accept the legitimacy and authority of decisions adopted by my fellow European citizens in the realization that in these areas I have given preference to choices made by my outreaching demos, rather than by my inreaching demos.
On this view, the Union demos turns away from its antecedents and understanding in the European nation-state. But equally, it should be noted that I am suggesting here something that is different than simple American Republicanism transferred to Europe. First, the values one is discussing may be seen to have a special European specificity, a specificity I have explored elsewhere but one dimension of which, by simple way of example, could most certainly be that strand of mutual social responsibility embodied in the ethos of the Welfare State adopted by all European societies and by all political forces. But the difference from American Republicanism goes further than merely having a different menu of civic values and here it also differs from Habermasian Constitutional Patriotism. Americanism was too, after all, about nation building albeit on different premises. Its end state, its myth, as expressed in the famous Pledge of Allegiance to the America Flag -- One Nation, Indivisible, Under God -- is not what Europe is about at all: Europe is precisely not about One Nation, not about a Melting Pot and all the rest, for despite the unfortunate rhetoric of Unity, Europe remains (or ought to remain) committed to "... an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe." Likewise, it is not about indivisibility nor, blessedly, about God.
The Treaties on this reading would have to be seen not only as an agreement among states (a Union of States) but as a "social contract" among the nationals of those states -- ratified in accordance with the constitutional requirements in all Member States -- that they will in the areas covered by the Treaty regard themselves as associating as citizens in this civic society. We can go even further. In this polity, and to this demos, one cardinal value is precisely that there will not be a drive towards, or an acceptance of, an over-arching organic-cultural national identity displacing those of the Member States. Nationals of the Member States are European Citizens, not the other way around. Europe is "not yet" a demos in the organic national-cultural sense and should never become one.
One should not get carried away with this construct. Note first that the Maastricht formula does not imply a full decoupling: Member States are free to define their own conditions of membership and these may continue to be defined in national terms. But that, in my view, is the greatest promise of introducing supranational citizenship into a construct the major components of which continue to be States and nations. The National and the Supranational encapsulate on this reading two of the most elemental, alluring and frightening social and psychological poles of our cultural heritage. The national is Eros: Reaching back to the pre-modern, appealing to the heart with a grasp on our emotions, and evocative of the romantic vision of creative social organization. But we know that darkness lurks too. The Supranational is Civilization: Confidently modernist, appealing to the rational within us and to Enlightenment neo-classical humanism. Here, too, we are aware of the frozen and freezing aspect this humanism might take. Martin Heidegger is an unwitting ironic metaphor for the difficulty of negotiating between these poles earlier in this Century. His rational, impersonal critique of totalistic rationality and of modernity remain a powerful lesson to this day; but equally powerful is the lesson from his fall: An irrational, personal embracing of an irrational, romantic pre-modern nationalism run amok.
