Saturday, March 15, 2014
Hampton (Omni Shoreham)
The ‘market bias’ underpinning discussions about EU citizenship is quite puzzling. It may be difficult to find another category of persons, apart from EU citizens, for whom the personal and the professional do not overlap. Such economic determinism implies that: i) certain aspects of the self can have a separate existence thereby suggesting, and defending, a fragmentary self; and ii) freedom of movement can be separated from the sociality that accompanies one’s pre-border crossing status and his/her settlement in another Member State. In other words, it is not only a naïve economism that underpins the notion of ‘market citizenship’, but also a methodological individualism since the term ‘market citizens’ necessarily centres our mind to ‘asocial citizens’ and ‘floaters’, that is, individuals willing to cross borders in order to maximise their economic self-interest. In what follows, I argue that these conceptions are misleading and misplaced for a number of reasons and that free movement of persons in the European Union cannot be thought of separately from its social, political and normative dimensions. If we are to understand what being an EU citizen means, we need to see individuals ‘in their fullness’ and not to focus on one aspect of their lives, namely, the economic one, prioritise this and then infer the rest. In addition, we must get a number of foci of inquiry into balance and to integrate the civil, political and social dimensions of EU citizenship, on the one hand, and rights and (future) duties, on the other.
