Beyond ‘ever closer union’: retrospective on 30 years of union citizenship and what they tell us about the future

Abstract

Binary descriptions have traditionally taken centre stage in many analyses of Union citizenship, signalling the assumption of an inbuilt dynamism towards a pre-determined objective. This contribution moves beyond the vision of constant betterment for Union citizenship and the European Union at large. For that purpose, it reconstructs the institutional practice, with its seemingly erratic combination of ‘progress’ and ‘standstill’, as normative fault lines. In geology, a fault line is a section of the earth’s surface where rock has been visibly displaced as a result of plate tectonic forces, which, in the domain of Union citizenship, correspond to several constitutional tensions pushing and pulling the case law in diverse directions. For many years, these tensions did not exercise a decisive influence; anyone could project their understanding onto the skeleton of abstract Treaty articles. This is no longer possible at a time when Union citizenship touches upon salient topics which define the democratic context. It is these constitutional tensions, such as disagreement over the degree of centralization, the value of (im)mobility, or the reconfiguration of membership, which sustain our hypothesis that Union citizenship is defined by postmodern ambiguity rather than the modernist ideal of irrefutable progress. An awareness of this change allows readers to chart their way through the institutional practice by defining the legal and normative parameters for future developments.