Introduction: The Rescaling of Territory and Citizenship in Europe

Abstract

This Special Issue explores the consequences of past and ongoing processes of territorial rescaling on citizenship in a theoretical and comparative perspective. In this introduction, we unpack our core concept of territorial rescaling and discuss its implications for the citizenship status and rights of those groups and individuals who reside in the contested territory or are connected to it. We show that in the context of the European multilevel federation, territorial rescaling is rather the norm than the exception, an inherent feature of ongoing processes of integration and disintegration instead of an anomaly. The rescaling of territorial borders invariably leads to the realignment of membership boundaries. The articles focus on various related issues, such as the delineation of the franchise in constitutive referendums; the democratic foundations of multilevel secession; and citizenship in ‘aspiring’ states ( e.g. Catalonia and Scotland), ‘new’ states (e.g. the Successor States of Former Yugoslavia) and ‘contested’ states (e.g. Kosovo and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus).

Acknowledgements

We thank the Ethnopolitics editors Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff for their patience and guidance throughout the editorial process, Gianni d’Amato and the Nccr—on the move team for their generous support, and all the participants to the Workshop ‘An Ever Looser Union: Territorial rescaling and citizenship in the emerging European order’, held at the University of Neuchâtel in December 2017.

ORCID

Jean-Thomas Arrighi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4174-4818

Dejan Stjepanović http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9192-8650

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR)—on the move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation; and by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No 716350].