In the olden days, when international travel was a bit more than wishful thinking, I would always dread going down the airport corridor that would take me to the border control booth. My anxiety was caused by the knowledge that somewhere along that corridor, I would see a sign telling me to go to the ‘long queue’, often reserved for those who were crossing an external border of the European Union (EU) but were not EU citizens. For that reason, like many other people, would relate EU citizenship to the ability to travel freely. Little did I know then that EU citizenship entailed far more than free movement across borders; that it was a nexus of rights going beyond those that states afford to their citizens, and a mirror of European diversity. As such, EU citizenship is marvellously complex, utterly desirable, and possibly insufficiently appreciated or instrumentalised. How so?
Citizenship of the European Union (EU citizenship) has been established in 1992 to define the rights of citizens of the member states across the Union. Its essence has been enshrined in article 9 of the Maastricht Treaty. Interestingly, even though some form of Europe-wide rights had been contemplated among the Member States since the 1960s, the question of EU citizenship was the stumbling stone for the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. In June 1992, the Danish people rejected the Treaty in a referendum, eventually leading to stipulations – in the treaties of Amsterdam in 1997 and Lisbon in 2007 – of the particular nature of EU citizenship as reflective of the legal and political architecture of the EU. Put simply, while EU citizenship is deeply engrained in this architecture, it does not and cannot exist on its own, but is linked to national citizenship of Member States, as highlighted in article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. In this sense, the EU citizenship is of a derivative nature. It represents what Rainer Bauböck (2010: 848) referred to as a ‘citizenship constellation’, or ‘a structure in which individuals are simultaneously linked to several political entities, so that their legal rights and duties are determined not only by one political authority, but by several’.… »
