Abstract
When interpreted as citizenship of the European Union, the development of European citizenship has prompted a series of debates on rights, membership and belonging, and democracy and constitutionalism. These debates can be enriched by highlighting the ways in which European citizenship is enacted by a variety of actors. It is argued that acts of European citizenship occur under two different dynamics: extension and assertion. Acts under the dynamic of extension are most often acts extending existing legal citizenship regimes by formal and public institutions, such as the European Court of Justice. Acts under the hitherto relatively neglected dynamic of assertion are likely to be more diffuse in location and visibility and uncertain in their goals and impacts. Understanding such acts – and the links between acts under the two dynamics – has the potential to reinvigorate and expand research agendas in the study of European citizenship.
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Notes
The article builds on work in the Enacting European Citizenship (ENACT) project, funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 7, and coordinated by The Open University in the United Kingdom. For further details see www.enacting-citizenship.eu/. I am grateful to participants in the workshop on Enacting European Citizenship of Third Country Nationals in the EU (Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, March 2009) and the ENACT workshop Making Connections (Koc University, Istanbul, October 2009). My thanks also to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. Though I have drawn extensively on research conducted across ENACT, I am solely responsible for the present framework and interpretation.
Some perspectives in the existing literature on European citizenship do stress the role of acts and practices in the development of the formal or legal status. Weiner (1998), for example, observes that citizenship practice through discourses and mobilisations is key to that development. Jenson (2007) achieves something similar in her analysis of the EU's ‘citizenship regime’. These fruitful efforts focus primarily on aspects of what I call the ‘dynamic of extension’; acts under the dynamic of assertion, as I hope to show, help to bring a new layer of acts of citizenship into debates on EU citizenship.
‘Emic’ interpretations refer to those that are couched within the cultural understandings of the group concerned. Etic interpretations derive from sources separate from that community. I have separated the (en)actor from both because to include the actor within the emic category may wrongly and pre-emptively dismiss the enactor's capacity to think and act outside attendant cultural frames. The use of these distinctions in no way implies the objectivity or even the superior accuracy of etic interpretations.
One key question is whether an act of citizenship can only be recognised from its consequences (and therefore retrospectively). Many such acts will be recognisable in this way, but it would be unhelpfully stipulative to rule out acts of assertion (for example) whose consequences remain unclear.
See Diana Coole's (2005) account of the varied forms in which ‘agentic capacities’ may be realised.
In this context, see also the discussion of ‘mobile acts’ by Aradau et al (2008).
Shaw (2007, p. 2551) explicitly notes the importance of the idea of extension to characterise the development of the application of the legal status of EU citizenship with respect to the principle of non-discrimination.
The formally fundamental status of European citizenship is, according to Bellamy (2006, p. 249), accompanied by a matching political-cultural outlook: ‘Certainly, the self-image of EU institutions – most notably the ECJ – is that they are superior to national governments, parliaments and courts within their sphere of competence’.
Though harmonisation may be the goal of EU institutions, they tend to focus on the procedures and instruments rather than the underlying ideals. Making further advances often involves creating new instruments to deal with national anomalies (Mantu, 2009a).
Of course, core EU actors do not necessarily share one precise conception of what the end point is or should be, or of the character of the obstacles or anomalies that lie in the path of its realisation. As Shaw (2010, p. 14) has recently commented, ‘few can agree about what constitutes the appropriate limits to Union citizenship’.
A number of examples of actors under the dynamic of assertion may tend towards Ranciere's (1999) ‘part of no part’. But we need to recognise different types of ‘parts of no part’. Whether the part/no part distinction is manifested as heard/unheard, seen/unseen, formal/informal, or powerful/powerless, we can distinguish for example: the part of the key part, the part of the visible part, the part of the marginal part, the part of the feared part, the part of the scapegoat and so on.
Case C-135/08 Janko Rottmann v. Freistaat Bayern.
Shaw (2010) argues that the ECJ has begun to pursue a more expansive notion of extending the scope and content of European citizenship within the frame of a ‘euro-polity’, even if it has not yet fully taken up the challenges involved.
Although Shaw (2010) refers to ‘contrasting dynamics at the interface of integration and constitutionalism’, the dynamics she refers to are largely contained within the dynamic of extension within the terms of the present analysis.
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Saward, M. The dynamics of European citizenship: Enactment, extension and assertion. Comp Eur Polit 11, 49–69 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.2