The European citizenship: A transnational challenge

Résumé du document

A citizen is "by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory [...]". Hannah Arendt asserted thus, in 1968, that the concept of citizenship is necessarily a national enterprise, an assertion that has long been taken for granted both at popular and scholar levels. However, in order to study whether this conventional view is questionable or not, we need to make an attempt to define the much controversial concept of "citizenship". Indeed, the primary study of the different angles of citizenship, and the way they all are bound to the concept of "nation-state", seems the best way to understand how extraordinary a challenge to this view the emergence of a transnational "European citizenship" is nowadays.

Extraits

[...] The locus of citizenship is here again the nation-state, as source and guarantor of rights. But the case of the EU discussed later might balance this assumption. A third most accepted conception of citizenship is its definition by the active involvment in the life of the political community, derived from the Ancient Greeks.[8] The citizen both rules and is ruled, and he has an interest in contributing to the ruling of the society since he can only meets his personal interest in the conviviality and communality of the society. [...]

[...] What is more, the European Citizenship is not an independant membership in that sense that it is subordinated to the citizenship of a member state. It is a “supplementary” citizenship as Joe Painter points out, or what others call second-order citizenship”[14]. However limited, the European Citizenship can still stand for an important development in challenging the ever-asserted notion of nation-state citizenship. B The challenge of transnationality The European citizenship can be perceived as an interesting challenge to the nation-centered concept in all its facets. [...]

[...] On the right- level citizenship, the frame for the concept has also changed. The EU has set rights for the citizens to bring cases in the European Court of Justice against EU institutions and the European Court of Justice has also held that nationals of Member States of the European Community can enforce human rights specified in the European Convention on Human rights in national courts, even against their own government.[16] The Court has also elaborated a system of constitutional general principles which must be observed within the Community legal order. [...]

[...] Euroconsciousness is not self-evident but it is still present at a large extent in almost all the 15 member-states of this survey that unfortunately was too early to study also the ten new EU-members. These numbers yet seem to enhance the idea of a multi-level citizenship that would take into account local, national, regional, ethnic, social, associational, and so on, sensitivities. And this could be the biggest challenge the EU citizenship could represent to the nation-state citizenship. Conclusion Citizenship has long been bound to the territoriality of the nation-statein its different aspects, focusing alternatively on its legal status, its rights, its political activity and also affective link to an imagined community. [...]

[...] Painter helped us to consider how the EU citizenship is much derived from the national ideal. Yet, the EU innovation transnationalises the concept in this sense that it denationalises the locus of citizenship at the European level. What is more, whereas trying to emphasise a European common identity to reinforce citizenship in the EU, the European Commission should maybe try to enhance this very diversity that could provide the traditional concept with another challenge, which is to deal at multiple levels. [...]