Reconfiguring EU Citizenship: Harder Social Rights and Some Soft Duty

With the Treaty of Maastricht, national citizenship has been complemented with a new layer, EU citizenship. While there is evidence, twenty-five years on, that European citizens do know and value EU citizenship, there is also some disappointment about the latter’s actual effects in terms of integration and bonding, especially in the light of rising Euroscepticism, souvranisme and anti-immigration sentiments. Is there a way of enhancing EU citizenship along the social dimension - i.e. that solidarity component which played a key role in transforming nation states into communities of trust?

The core of EU citizenship is the right of free movement. In order to uphold and facilitate the exercise of such right, the EU has introduced over time a number of facilitating schemes and services (such as the European network of employment services, the Erasmus program, the European health insurance card and so on). Expanding the range, scope and size of such initiatives and opening some of them also to non-mobile citizens (e.g. training and up skilling programs) would be a promising way to making EU citizenship more visible and consequential. Survey evidence shows that moves in this direction would be highly welcomed by public opinion. National citizenship and welfare regimes were not born with a historical Big Bang, but with a slow sequence of incremental reforms. In different guises, similar reforms at the supranational level could help the EU to overcome its legitimacy deficit.