George Vassilev
UC
Berkeley
PEIS
140
Prof.
Meinolf Dierkes
10.01.2002
The question of European citizenship
cannot be dealt with simply by using the terminology and concepts of national citizenship.
By virtue of its supra-national nature, the European Union cannot, by definition, provide a form of citizenship that
is strictly identical to a traditional concept of citizenship. The several layers
of citizenship, present in the EU, are in dynamic relation to each other and are thus symbiotic, feeding off of each other. The supra-national level cannot simply mimic the existing national concept. Thus, conceiving of the notion of European citizenship, one has to redefine the concept of citizenship
itself.
First of all, one has to examine the
question whether European citizenship really exists and if so, what forms it takes.
The treaty of Maastricht
of 1992 introduced European citizenship in article 8 as an operational concept, stating that "Citizenship of the Union
shall complement and not replace national citizenship" (Norbert Reich, 299). Furthermore,
article 17 of the treaty of Amsterdam elaborated on that statement and introduced
the current wording relating to citizenship of the Union.
At present, the concept of EU citizenship
is predominantly based on the right of free movement within the Union which benefits the economic citizen
(or the Bourgeois), not so much the non-economic citizen (or the Citoyen) who would benefit from a social approach to citizenship,
claims Reich. Alongside the free movement rights, Europeans enjoy other standard
rights of citizenship, such as voting in or standing for election at the municipal level or the right to grieve with the Ombudsperson.
However, this does not present a coherent
and comprehensive citizenship model that equates different strata of the European community.
Rather, it expresses the Neo-Functionalist approach, favoured in the process of Euro-integration that focuses on harmonizing
markets and balancing the aggregate economy in the expectation of spill-over benefits to other sectors of policy, public and
personal life. As noted before, this creates a cleavage between the economic
and the non-economic citizen, which favours the former and largely disregards the latter at this level of Union integration.
Thus Reich distinguishes between two
levels of citizenship, the Legal and the Social ones, corresponding to the rights of the Bourgeois and the Citoyen respectively. Legal citizenship is not an autonomous concept, it is argued, like residence or discrimination. Rather, it is defined in terms of a member state's legislation. The concept of Social citizenship follows one of two paths. The
rights path looks for what specific rights beyond the existing ones will be extended on the supra-national level. This approach faces a growing area of uncertainty; to be precise, how will rights be stretched to protect
nationals of one member state in another. The rationale that seems to underlie
this is to protect "fundamental community objectives of market integration rather than to protect individual rights per
se" (Reich 303). Once again,
the cleavage between the Bourgeois and the Citoyen appears. Regardless, extending
rights is a growing tendency, which can be construed as a positive development.
The status path, on the other hand,
focuses on the horizontal extension of rights to all citizens and residents, an approach supported by global trends. Due to increased mobility, distribution of subjective rights is on the basis of legal
residence, not citizenship. This nowadays widely accepted practice extends many
rights to members of other states legally residing in a country, except for the provision of direct political entitlements
and certain kinds of employment. This approach seems to be the most challenging
because of the problem it would create in the treatment of members of third countries.
It would present an additional level of complexity to the already complicated European social policy dimension. Namely, what entitlements should be distributed to a citizen of a third country that
chooses to employ the right of free mobility within the European Union as a resident of one of the member states. Employment would be a huge obstacle, voting at all three levels of authority (the local, the national and
the supra-national) would become close to impossible to arrange. Also, natural
EU citizens would like to impede immigration as they face a rigid labour market often coupled with a shortage of social services
and hyper-urbanization. Furthermore, if social services such as education, health
care or pensions are extended to residents under the same conditions as citizens, this would create huge immigration and budget
problems. Lingering chauvinism should also not be disregarded.
Within codifying and developing Social
citizenship lies the heart of the matter. European citizenship, very much like
the Union itself, is a work in progress. Unless it is
fundamentally defined, the concept and indeed the reality of EU citizenship would not be fully functional. Scholars, such as Marie Jose Garot, cited by Reich (305), try to decouple nationality and citizenship and
extend full rights to denizens (lawful residents, who are not citizens of any member state) because she believes they contribute
as much as citizens to the welfare of the communities they reside in.
Furthermore, social citizenship does
not only entail the provision of human rights and access to welfare and other public benefits but should also imply a set
of duties and responsibilities, a side of social policy that has gotten minimal attention in EU legislation, if any at all. But are these feasible at the current juncture?
Until now, Reich states, "Union citizenship has remained a metaphor with some added value." (Reich, 308)
Once that the lack of a social dimension
on the EU level is identified as the main obstacle to implementing a functional concept of EU citizenship, it is necessary
to examine the different types of Social Citizenship.
One approach to defining it is through the concept of Residual Social Membership. This is "a federation of autonomous and sovereign states possessing only minor supra-state competence
(where) social rights guaranteed by the EU are minimal" (Thomas Faist, 312). The arguments in support of this view
on Social Citizenship state that the EU has primarily dealt with market-making and compatibility issues since its contrivance. As a result, EU social rights have become effective in very few areas- workplace safety
regulation and gender equality are among them. However, "the core issues of wage
bargaining are still excluded from EU competence: remuneration, the right to strike, and labour union rights." (Faist, 313)
In opposition to this view, it must
be pointed out that the treaty of Amsterdam (1997) has the formal definition of
fundamental human rights; fundamental social rights are defined in the Charter of Social Rights 1989. Also, cooperation in
the social services sphere has been in place in a lot of European countries prior to joining the EMU in the late 1990s. This model overlooks the scheme that social citizenship is distributed throughout
the multi-level governance system of the EU; a fundamental approach toward building the EU as a whole.
Another approach to Social Citizenship
is that of Post-national Social Membership. Its main postulate is that the great
inter-and supra-state mobility present in today's world and in the EU specifically requires that denizens and citizens rights
have to be merged. This issue, described in detail above is plagued by
the problem of redistribution. As meritorious as it is on the plane of democratic
treatment of the issue, this approach would remain purely theoretical for a long time in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps the most promising approach
toward understanding and resolving the issue of European citizenship is the Nested Social Membership model. It clearly reflects the institutional setup of the EU, and it manages to deal with the dynamic relationship
between the different levels of authority. Nested Social Membership resides in
multiple sites; in "an interactive system of politics, policies, and social rights between the sub-state, state, inter-state
and supra-state levels." (Faist, 314) It implies multiple levels which mirrors
the political structure of EU institutions altogether. It also implies a sort
of federative membership as a cumulative phenomenon, not merely an additive one (which is the essence of multiple citizenship).
Furthermore, it adequately represents the reality of sharpened tension between
third state members and proper EU citizens.
Since "most analysts take the model
of a sovereign state as the final destination for European integration "(Faist, 315), it is necessary that all constraints
to its achievement be recognized. Euro-optimists have identified certain deficits
in achieving social integration of European citizenship.
The Solidarity Deficit, they claim,
must be overcome since it is necessary to rally resources to reduce social exclusion on an aggregate European level. But is
it really essential since in the past, welfare institutions developed first and solidarity came afterward? The weak point of the argument, according to Faist, is that the causal arrows usually run both ways. That statement, in turn, also provides a source of doubt because if causality is directed
both from the dependent to the independent variable in this model and vice versa, then it is very likely there is only a correlation
involved and not causality.
The Cultural Deficit concept states that Europe
is devoid of a cultural framework independent of the nation state. This is not
necessarily true because there are different sentiments for or against Europeanization in different member states.
A key ingredient in the allocation of
legitimacy to the different layers of authority in the EU is borrowed from the Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity, and transformed
into the contemporary category of Devolution. In other words, power is delegated
to the lowest level of competency that can exercise it. This encourages the idea
of Multi-level governance but it is sometimes hard to identify the proper institution to be charged with a particular task.
Still, the practical difficulty remains
for Europeans to reconcile their national and regional sense of identity with the all-European, which is the project of policy
implementation and rational contrivance. In a study of German and French attitudes
toward the integration of the national with the supra-national identity, Joachim Schild notes that "a national identity should
not be construed in opposition to a European one and vice versa." (Schild, 324). According to studies on the matter by Eurobarometer since 1982 France
and Germany, often seen as polar on the issues of public support
for the integration process (where France presents a fairly
nation-centric attitude, while Germany boasts energetic support
for it), German enthusiasm has been steadily declining during the 1990s. This
is possibly due to the rallying of resources to strengthen the central level of authority, where Germany
has been the major investor in terms of finance, institutional leadership and expertise.
There is a certain renewal of regional collective identities in the Basque country, Lombardy,
Flanders, Scotland, Wales. The above suggests that there is "growing importance of cost-benefit considerations
for the sense of European identity" (Schild, 327). That is, unlike the sense
of local or national identity, which are essentially sentimental, the feeling of European-ness is dependent on what the development
of the EU gives in addition to, or takes away from the local and national identity, expressed in terms of benefits. With the common currency in circulation and performing well for about a year, it is interesting whether
transcending local and national identity has been eased. In an electronic interview,
carried out for the purposes of this research paper, Mr. Schild notes that
indeed...the
Euro does change things. It will enhance the European identification of those citizens whose countries are members of the
Euro-zone. But it will not improve the legitimacy of the whole EU as there will be a number of member states in an enlarged
EU which won't be members of the Euro-zone in the near future.
Further, Mr. Schild points out that "the antiquated notion
of a common culture has to be complemented, though not entirely replaced, with European citizenship as a common project."
(Schild, 318).
Now that European citizenship has been
codified in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the different facets of it have been defined, it is apparent that citizenship of the
European Union cannot be in any sense a mechanical construct based on traditional notions of identity and citizenship. The concept of EU citizenship is dispersed along the lines of the local, national
and supra-national levels of political legitimacy, just as all other levels of authonomy within the Union. Belongingness to the united Europe is generally viewed through
the prism of cost and benefit to the local and the national levels. Thus, in
unison with rational choice theory, the citizens of the member states would support a drive to unifying European citizenship
and all which it entails only if that would bring additional benefits at a reasonable cost. The following logical step in
bringing that closer to reality is a focus on definition and operationalization of Social Citizenship which would eliminate
asymmetries between the different member states in the provision of transfer payments, health care, educational financial
assistance and all other forms of social services.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. Eurobarometer
URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/
2. Faist Thomas, University
of Bremen, Social Citizenship in
the European Union: Nested Membership, Journal of Common Market Studies, March 2001, Vol. 39
in Dierkes,
Meinolf, PEIS 140, Europe in Transition: Can its Institutions Adapt?,
UC Berkeley, 2002
3. Reich, Norbert, Union Citizenship- Metaphor or Source
of Rights, European Law Journal Vol. 7, No.1, March 2001, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA, USA
in Dierkes,
Meinolf, PEIS 140, Europe in Transition: Can its Institutions Adapt?,
UC Berkeley, 2002
4. Schild, Joachim,
Deutsch- Franzosisches Institut, National v. European Identities? French and Germans in the European Multi-Level
System, Journal of Common Market Studies, June 2001, Vol. 39, No.2
in Dierkes,
Meinolf, PEIS 140, Europe in Transition: Can its Institutions Adapt?,
UC Berkeley, 2002
5. Schild, Joachim,
interview 09.29.2002, joachim.schild@swp-berlin.org, Dr. Joachim Schild Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Forschungsgruppe
I: Europäische Integration
Ludwigkirchplatz 3-4 10719 Berlin, Tel: + 49 30 88007-202 Fax: -100
