Reframing political space. Pro-European mobilisation and the enactment of european citizenship

ABSTRACT

This article asks how pro-European activism relates to the idea of European citizenship. Its ambition is to evaluate recent mobilisations in light of an activist understanding of citizenship and relate them to a broader dynamic of reframing political space. Despite its ambivalent founding in market integration, EU citizenship as a legal status has a political potential which has hardly been sufficiently discussed. Exploring the performative as well as polity-constituting dimension of enactments of European citizenship, the article elaborates on the role of narratives and imaginaries of democratic founding that are the basis for political mobilisation. Reflecting on recent attempts to transfer the idea of constituent power to a transnational setting, it suggests a reinterpretation which incorporates the inherent paradoxical dimension of enactment and representation. ‘Constitutive moments’ are sequences of rupture rather than single events, creating narratives of shared past and future, which reach out to construct new commonalities.

KEYWORDS:

• EU citizenship
• pro-European activism
• constituent power
• european integration
• transnational democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The rhetoric of a European constitutional renewal has become widespread among a variety of different actors, culminating somewhat around the European elections in May 2019. A multiplicity of pro-European social movements, prominently e.g. ‘Pulse of Europe’ (PoE), were founded since 2016 when disintegration has been increasingly perceived as a real threat. Some of them have transformed into party-movements e.g. ‘Demokratie in Bewegung’ has become the German election wing of the movement party network of DiEM25. (https://bewegung.jetzt/bewegung/). In Greece it is MeRA25 (Greek Patriotic Front of Responsibly disobedient Europeanists). Also VOLT was founded with the aim of forming the first ‘genuinely united transnational party, see: https://www.volteuropa.org/. For PoE see https://pulseofeurope.eu; for the PoE initiative ‘homeparliaments: homeparliaments.eu. For a further discussion of ‘countermovements’ and anti-austerity movement parties in Southern Europe (SYRIZA, Podemos, M5S) see della Porta et al. 2017; Seeliger/Sommer 2019. As an example for an academic initiative of democratic refounding see Piketty et al. 2017.

2. Art. 8 of the Maastricht Treaty (today Art. 21, TFEU) states that ‘Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union’ and continues that ‘Every citizen of the Union shall have the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the member states (…)’.

3. Cf. Shaw 2007, 38. Nevertheless the introduction was made possible by a particular power constellation in the European parliament as well as by support among Unions and civil society associations promoting this project (for a reconstruction of this process see Maas 2007, Chap. 2).

4. Expressed in the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) proclamation that Union citizenship is ‘intended to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member states’. Paradoxically though, the Court derives rights from a fundamental status that does not yet exist (see Pavlos Eleftheriadis, The Content of European Citizenship, German Law Journal, 15 (5), 2014, 777–796). Concerning the ‘Four Freedoms’ as the substance of European Law see Barnard 2010.

5. A. J. Menéndez/E. D.H. Olsen, Challenging European Citizenship. Ideals and Realities in Contrast, Palgrave Macmilllan 2019, Chap. 3. Menéndez and Olsen argue that so far EU citizenship lacks fundamental elements of democratic and social citizenship and is still torn between two possible articulations: ‘proto-citizenship’ and supra-nationality.

6. Council Directive 2004/38/EC of 29 April 2004. For a detailed analysis see Seeleib-Kaiser 2018.

7. This shift to a residence-based principle of access to rights is not applied ‘all the way down’ though: EU citizenship gives voting rights for communal and European, but not national elections. For a critical discussion see Bauböck 2019, Part 1.

8. The ‘non-discrimination principle’ which ensures equal treatment by other member states (Art 18, TFEU) can only guarantee relative equality (dependent on the respective level of welfare rights in the particular state) and it excludes from full access to welfare provisions (see EN 6).

9. We leave the argument that the real driver is neither the European Citizenry nor the governments of the member states but the European Court of Justice aside here. For a discussion see Grimm 2015, Schmidt 2018.

10. For a collection of the corner stones of the debate see Lord 2015.

11. See Bellamy/Castiglione/Shaw 2007, Chalmers/Jachtenfuchs/Joerges 2017. Eurobarometer data from 2017 and 2019 show that, despite the rise of Eurosceptic views, indicators of levels of attachment to the EU have remained stable after the economic crisis. Interestingly the percentage of those who see themselves as European citizens is considerably higher than those who feel attached to the European Union as such (see Eurobarometer 2017, 2019; for an interpretation of this observation Cheneval/Ferrin 2018.

12. This doesn’t mean to suggest a sharp contrast between status and transformative practices but rather an interdepence. A status must be enacted and on the other hand, a status shapes how citizenship is enacted (see below section three and Saward 2013a, also: Mackert/Turner 2017.

13. See Honneth 1995 and Honneth 2015, part C. Honneth analyzes the dynamics of struggles for equality and democratization as struggles for recognition. For a more conflictual reconstruction of deepening and broadening dynamics see Balibar 2014.

14. The normative surplus of EU citizenship is rigorously pointed out as a reaction to anti-European politics, expressed in the Brexit-referendum. In the UK (but also beyond) mass pro-EU mobilisation became a new phenomenon after the country had decided to leave the EU. This can be explained by the extent to which Brexit is experienced as an injustice in Fraser’s sense (Brändle/Galpin/Trenz 2018): It not only shatters life expectations and identities of those how feel personally affected by their country’s decision to leave the EU. It is the outrage of being deprived of concrete rights and the fact that these rights cannot be replaced by a return to ‘national citizenship’ that brings peoples to the streets. Brexit concerns citizens’ ‘right to have rights’ as EU citizens and affects the system of political representation within which political struggles are supposed to take place.

15. Cf. EC Citizenship reports 2013, 2017; https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/b36abf10-09bd-4155-af71-c7f71cbdc4c2/language-en; https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what- is-new/news/news/20170124_eu_citizenship_report_2017_en.pdf.

16. Very roughly one could say that the logic of citizenship implies the value of equality whereas the logic of the market implies the value of competitiveness. Although the ‘four freedoms’ in the EU seem to level down the difference, it is clear that freedom of movement for persons is a different issue than free movements of goods: since persons are not considered as a commodity traded across borders, they enjoy the right to equal treatment in their host state (Schiek 2017, 355–56). A moving person claiming equal rights challenges the national idea of membership. Her presence affects the social composition of the demos – the collective reference point of citizenship (see Seubert 2018, 24–25).

17. This is related to a ‘practice turn’ which builds on the diagnosis that informal forms of citizenship become increasingly more important (see e.g. Sassen 2008). Contestations of formal understandings are brought forward, independent of one’s formal citizenship status. The enactment approach of citizenship, to which Engin Isin has considerably contributed, shares this insight: rights are conceptualised as dynamic relations, i.e. extensions and assertions of claims and counter-claims (see e.g. Isin/Turner 2002; Isin 2008; Isin/Saward 2013).

18. For a social connection model of justice see Young 2007, Chap. 9.

19. According to Hooghe/Marks 2009 politicisation became a crucial phenomenon due to the transfer of authority to the European level which passed a critical threshold with the enactment of the Treaty of Maastricht. For further analysis see Grande/Kriesi 2016.

20. Saward 2013a, 50. Saward distinguishes ‘acts of extension’ and ‘acts of assertion’, which overlaps partly with Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative paths of a politics of framing. The latter are characterized by putting into question the state-territorial principle of framing (Fraser 2008, 22–23). They mobilise against ‘misframing’ in the sense of a lack of institutions were disputes about the ‘who’ can be democratically aired and resolved (27).

21. Isin 2008, 38. Isin introduces the concept of ‘answerability’ as a two-sided process in order to describe the ‘paradox of acts’: Acts are supposed to respond to challenges with a unique performance but interpreting these acts we ought to resist the temptation of perceiving them within the frame of already existing concepts. Only then can they really be creative in the sense of breaking with repetition (ibid. 29–39).

22. Williams 2009, 43. The idea of ‚fate‘ is traditionally used in a national context and refers to an unchosen connection: We find ourselves thrown together, in a web of relationships that have a history but also extend into a foreseeable future. And yet this web is open to reconstitution: interdependencies are partly voluntarily created (in the EU e.g. through the opening up of national boundaries), partly undecided, stemming from a common past (memories of violent confrontations as well as common political and cultural traditions) and partly emanate from future challenges (such as climate crisis).

23. Cf. Krastev 2007, 2017. Ivan Krastev diagnoses the rise of a ‘democratic illiberalism’- a term that is deeply misleading insofar as it suggests that democracy can be separated from fundamental rights.

24. Party-movements such as DiEM25 or Podemos try to conceive of populism in a progressive way. Far from being a perversion of democracy it is supposed to constitute the political force to recover it and expand it in today’s Europe. For a theoretical approach to left populism see Mouffe 2018.

25. Ackerman 1991. Paradigmatic examples are the historical conditions in which the first modern constitutions were established: the American and the French Revolution.

26. ‘(A)t periods of peak mobilization, victorious movements use their control standing institutions to take actions that go well beyond normal legal authority’ (ibid, Vol. 2, 384). Ackerman is primarily concerned with the US tradition and takes the New Deal period in the 1930s as an example.

27. According to Arendt this is established through the social contract in its ‘horizontal’ form (in contrast to ‘vertical’ forms, see Arendt 1986 (1970)).

28. For the following see Arendt 1992 (1967), particularly Chap. 5.

29. In particular in the sense of division of power (for arguments in this direction see e.g. Volk, 2010). No doubt, her evaluation of the legal dimension of the political is ambivalent though: She frequently confronts the mere rule of law (‘bloße Rechtsstaat’) and the truly free republic (‘wirklich freie Republik’), cf. Arendt 1994 (1963): 280–281. Her political understanding of the rule of law overlaps with approaches which have been framed as ‘new constitutionalism’ (see Elkin/Soltan 1993; Preuß 1994).

30. The question which (legal) form the political should take breaks with a narrow liberal understanding in which the rule of law is supposed to focus primarily on the protection of individual rights and containment of state power. Arendt’s approach also implies the idea of a social constitution (beyond the formal legal one). It is realized through the unifying power of ‘acting in concert’, embedded in common practices and reproduced through memories and narratives (see, among others, Benhabib 2003, Chap. 6).

31. See Saward 2013a. For the idea of the constitution as a ‘project’ see Habermas 1987.

32. For an overview on these debates see the Editorial ‘We the people(s) of Europe: Polity making and democracy in the EU’ by J.P.Beetz, L.Corrias and B. Crum, 2017, 23.

33. For an extensive reconstruction see Patberg 2018, Chap.4.

34. Cf. Böckenförde (1994), who argues the will for a constitution has to be based on a will to self-limitation, 72.

35. For this discussion see e.g. Krisch 2016; Crum 2012.

36. Cf. Habermas 2011, Habermas 2017. For a critical discussion see Niesen 2017, Patberg 2017; for a two-level theory of supranational democratic constitutalization see also Crum 2012; for a federated model more general see further Cohen 2012.

37. This ‘de-dramatizes’ the concept of constituent power, as Jean Cohen argues, and implies a radical different understanding of the political (compared to e.g. Carl Schmitt’s focus on sovereignty which is all about defining the ultimate locus of authority (cf. Cohen 2012, 153; Schmitt 2004 [1922]).

38. Nevertheless, Möller’s aim is not to exit from the ambivalent interplay between constituent and constituted power. Rather his idea is, with reference to Marx, to incorporate the ‘conflict of the constitution with itself’ (ibid., 23). And contrary to Gorgio Agamben he seeks to set limits to what can count as destituent power by ‘internal reflexivity’ (cf. Agamben 2014).

39. Which might well be a ‘long and tortuous process’, as Ben Crum assumes, rightly arguing that a European Constitutional consensus is unlikely to emerge in a short time such as the European Constitutional Treaty process (Crum 2012, 177).

Additional information

Funding

Research funding was provided through 7. General Program of the EU, ‘All Rights Reserved? Barriers toward European CITIZENship (bEUcitizen).’bEUcitizen, EU 7th framework program[320294];