Balancing the rights and duties of European and national citizens: a demoicratic approach

ABSTRACT

How should we conceive of the relationship between European citizenship and national citizenship from a normative perspective? While the Treaties assert the supplementary nature of European citizenship vis-à-vis national citizenship, advocates of trans- and supra-national citizenship perspectives have agreed with the European Court of Justice that Union citizenship will ultimately supplant or subsume national citizenship. By contrast, we draw upon demoicratic and stakeholder citizenship theories to defend the primacy of national over European citizenship. Taking the cases of political and welfare rights, we argue that member states may have special duties to second-country nationals stemming from a European social contract, but that these duties must be balanced against the rights and duties of national citizens stemming from the national social contract.

KEYWORDS:

• Demoicracy
• EU citizenship
• political rights
• stakeholder citizenship
• universal basic income
• welfare rights

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two referees and participants at the Transnationalization and the Judicialization of Welfare workshop for their perceptive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Richard Bellamy is Director of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute and Professor of Political Science at University College London.

Joseph Lacey is Junior Research Fellow in Politics at University College, Oxford.

ORCID

Richard Bellamy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9823-0626

Joseph Lacey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9290-8283

Notes

1. By contrast to the IR usage, we follow the usage of EU lawyers and employ ‘transnational’ citizenship to mean a right to the goods associated with citizenship in whatever state an individual happens to move and the potential of a horizontal dispersal of sovereign power.

2. Zielonka (2017) identifies two models of the transnationalism view: transnational networks (discussed above) and chaotic pluralism, a more anarchistic version based around the development of new technologies of interconnectedness.

3. Habermas has recently also argued that the European peoples and individual Union citizens are the co-constitutive subjects of the EU (2012: ix). However, his account remains supranational rather than demoicratic, denying the legitimacy of domestically authorised national executives playing a key role in EU levcl decision-making (2012: 6, 12) and regarding the constitutive moment as instituting the primacy of EU legislation over national law (2012: 11).

4. See, however, Nicoliadis (2013: 364) who points in this direction.

5. Joseph Carens (2013: 108) stops short of making the equal residency principle a requirement of justice, pointing instead to anything short of this as a potentially reprehensible narrow interpretation of duties to migrants.