The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy by Peo Hansen & Sandy Brian Hager

Author:Peo Hansen & Sandy Brian Hager [Hansen, Peo & Hager, Sandy Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781845457334
Google: feNUpra3on4C
Goodreads: 9245537
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2010-01-15T12:35:35+00:00

A New Deal for the Union’s (“Legal”) Third-Country Nationals?

The Meaning of Civic Citizenship

The pledge to improve the lot of the EU’s “legal” and permanently settled TCNs was clearly one of the boldest declarations made in Tampere. By stating that “a more vigorous integration policy should aim at granting them [TCNs] rights and obligations comparable to those of EU citizens,” the Council opened up for a revision of the legal restraints built into the EU citizenship that was instituted by the Maastricht Treaty. As was agreed upon in Maastricht (Part Two, Article 8(1)), “Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union” (Council of the European Communities, CEC 1992). To the extent, therefore, that the rights granted by the “European citizenship” altered the status of national citizenship, these alterations affected positively only the citizens of member states, and so created new hierarchies and cleavage structures between inhabitants in the EU area (see Balibar 2004; Kofman 2002). In this sense EU citizenship did not replace national citizenship but underlined its importance, since people residing in the Union could not acquire EU citizenship without first having acquired its counterpart in a member state.

As few could have failed to notice, the reluctance to incorporate the millions upon millions of resident TCNs into the new EU citizenship regime—and hence make residence rather than nationality the basis of membership—would be subjected to much criticism throughout the 1990s (see d’Oliveira 1995; Hansen, R. 1998; Kofman 1995; Martiniello 1995; O’Keeffe 1994). Besides the criticism being voiced from within academic circles and by various NGOs, the granting of extended rights to TCNs was also the subject of recurrent efforts on the part of the European Parliament and the Commission, particularly in order to redress the disparities between EU citizens and TCNs in the area of free movement.

It must be emphasized, though, that neither Amsterdam nor the declarations in Tampere indicated that permanently settled TCNs were about to become naturalized EU citizens any time soon, or, for that matter, that long-term residence was about to replace nationality as the determining principle of EU citizenship (Kostakopoulou 2002: 452). This provided, the strategy adopted by the Commission seemed rather to be geared toward making the most of Tampere’s pledge to grant rights to TCNs that were “comparable to those of EU citizens.”

According to Kostakopoulou (2002), the Commission’s endeavor to address and expand the rights of permanently settled and “legal” TCNs should indeed be seen as an “important step towards equal membership and full political inclusion.” Above all, Kostakopoulou (2002: 452, 454) contends, it makes clear that “[l]ong-term resident TCNs in the European Union are no longer invisible,” and that a “rights-based approach centred on the principle of equal treatment . . . and the granting of free movement rights has begun to emerge.” On the word of the Commission, this rights-based approach forms an integral part of the larger objective of fostering a sense of “civic citizenship” among the Union’s “legally” settled TCNs. According to

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