The roots of Union citizenship

The roots of Union citizenship can be traced back to the 1970s when Community politicians first began to discuss ‘European identity’. Initial concepts merely included student mobility, exchange of teachers and harmonisation of diplomas. A broader approach emerged at the 1973 Copenhagen summit where the European Commission suggested the introduction of a ‘passport union’ as well as ‘special rights’ for citizens of Member States (Wiener 1997: 539). These were defined as the ‘political rights traditionally withheld from foreigners’: the right to vote, the right to stand for election and the right to hold public office. Member States were to grant these rights, which were, and in general still are, tied to naturalisation, to resident citizens of another Member State (Wiener 1997: 540). Until then mobile Community workers had only benefited from labour-related rights. Hence, migration to another Member State meant disenfranchisement. In 1975 the Heads of Government of Belgium and Italy for the first time proposed to enfranchise all Community nationals on the local level (Connolly, Day & Shaw 2005: 6). The Commission's technical report on special rights even went further by stating that these ‘first and foremost’ imply ‘the rights to vote, to stand for election and to become a public official at local, regional and national levels’ (Connolly, Day & Shaw 2005: 8). Although the report is not completely clear on this subject, the formulation ‘at local, regional and national levels’ suggests that Community citizenship was meant to include not only local but also regional and national suffrage.

In the 1980s, the prevailing political paradigm changed towards privileging ‘negative integration’. This renewed focus on economic integration and the rights associated with freedom of movement pushed political participation into the background of debates on European Union citizenship. As a consequence, the sole steps towards reaching this goal in the 1980s were three directives establishing the right of residence for workers and their families as well as for students and the ‘Social Charter’ introducing social rights for Community citizens (Wiener 1997: 542). These improvements of social and economic rights for Community citizens residing in another Member State were, however, not accompanied by any political rights.