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ABSTRACT
This article provides a critical comment on chapter five of Richard Bellamy’s A Republican Europe of States. The chapter focuses on EU citizenship as a status conferring to EU citizens certain entitlements to social and political rights when they reside in a member state other than their own. The chapter rejects the view that EU citizenship should entail equal access to social and political rights and provides an argument as to why EU citizenship cannot but consist of a more restricted bundle of social and political rights than national citizenship. I question both the scope and necessity of these restrictions on EU citizens’ equal access to social and political rights, as well as whether this picture of EU citizenship is consistent with the earlier theoretical chapters of the book.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The term ‘welfare rights’ is used by Bellamy in a somewhat lax way. For the sake of clarity, I focus here on access to means-tested social assistance benefits such as jobseekers’ allowance and housing benefits which are at heart of debates on the scope of EU citizenship. For a discussion of the importance of the distinction between social assistance benefits funded by general taxation and social insurance benefits funded by prior social insurance contributions see, Efthymiou (Citation2020).
2. Bellamy could object here that mobile EU citizens enjoy protection from domination in their home member state and they therefore can opt out of such relations of domination by moving back to their home state. Note, however, that this is tantamount to arguing that I should not enjoy protection from physical assault in my host member state because I enjoy protection from physical assault in my home member state. Analogously, the fact that Angela enjoys effective protection from domination when she resides in her home state does not change the fact that she does not enjoy effective protection when she resides in another member state of the EU. The fact that Angela has chosen to work abroad for an employer that pays her more than her previous employer at her home state does not entail that Angela is not exploited by her new employer by being paid less than the equally qualified Carrie due to her lack of access to social assistance benefits. To put it more succinctly: Angela has the option to look for work without being dominated in her home state but she does not have the option to look for work without domination in her host state (at least not until she meets the criterion of stakeholding if we are to follow Bellamy). Hence, her choice to exercise the option to seek work in another member state is non-robustly protected when she loses access to welfare rights in her home state by residing in another state while not yet qualifying as a stakeholder in order to have similar access in her host state (as well as possibly due to differences in welfare rights provisions between her home and host member states that may be insufficient for Angela’s protection in her host state, if access to welfare rights were exportable but linked to provisions at her home member state). In sum, the absence of robust protections and resourcing in the exercise of the relevant choice in the host state render such a choice merely an instance of submission to domination and not the aftermath of effective control over that choice. Hence, the fact that Angela has chosen to take up a job abroad is irrelevant to whether her employment conditions are the result of submission to the social domination characteristic of exploitation. See below for a rebuttal of a possible justification for interfering with the robustness of Angela’s choice on grounds of unsustainable costs to the welfare system of the host member-state, as well as on the merits and demerits of exportable welfare rights. This claim is also rather puzzling given that Bellamy acknowledges the importance of freedom of movement for non-domination (see p. 162, 173).
3. Bellamy oscillates here between a purely political understanding of non-domination that is based on the idea that ‘the removal of the “circumstances of domination” dovetails with the establishment of the circumstances of legitimation’ and a more substantive one that acknowledges the need to robustly protect the autonomy of non-citizen residents from decisions of the citizenry that may allow for power imbalances, dependency and personal rule within the labour market and beyond. For example, if some welfare schemes (e.g. a guaranteed basic income scheme) serve non-domination better than alternatives that preclude such schemes, then non-domination cannot be merely political all the way down (contra Bellamy p. 58).
4. Access to current social assistance schemes (e.g. means-tested Job Seekers Allowance) is conditional on actively seeking work as well as on lacking the financial means (i.e. property and saving etc.) to avoid destitution. They are not conditional on prior contribution via work or any other form of contribution. Hence, the stakeholder criterion, as articulated by Bellamy, bars both nationals and EU immigrants from accessing welfare rights by introducing more stringent conditionalities than current ones.
5. See, Efthymiou (Citation2019) as to why a wider definition fails to motivate the kind of restrictions on access that Bellamy favours as well as Efthymiou (Citation2020) as to why a requirement of prior contribution fails to both explain and ground social assistance benefits.
6. Bellamy suggests that in such a scenario, EU immigrants, like Angela, dominate citizens like Boris and Carrie. It is unclear, however, how Angela’s equal access to welfare rights constitutes a form of domination over Boris and Carrie. If anything is wrong with equal access, then this is not due to domination on the part of EU citizens like Angela. See also footnote 2.
7. Note also that even if we grant that Angela’s host member state is not obligated to resource Angela’s welfare rights until Angela becomes a stakeholder in the host member state, this claim does not necessarily entail that Angela does not have a right to access welfare rights in the host member state but only that Angela’s home state, or the EU as a whole, is duty-bound to resource her access to welfare rights in her host state until she meets the relevant criteria of stakeholding in her host member state. Hence, the linkage of a stakeholder view of EU citizenship to current or similar restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights is unwarranted.
8. For a more detailed discussion as to what constitutes an unreasonable burden to a welfare system and how such burdens should be shared, when, if ever, they materialise, as well as how invoking such burdens could serve the exploitation of EU immigrants by nationals, see, Efthymiou (Citation2019, Citation2021).
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Notes on contributors
Dimitrios Efthymiou
Dimitrios Efthymiou is a postdoctoral research fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt and PI of the project ‘Towards a Transnational Theory of Justice for the EU’. He is principally interested in normative political theory and has a particular interest in its feasibility conditions and application to public policy. His current research project focuses on labour migration in the EU and its normative implications for the nature and scope of the welfare state.