The Maastricht Treaty (the “Treaty”) first introduced the status of EU citizenship. The twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty, marked in 2013, was declared the European Year of the Citizen. Union citizenship has been understood as the world's first post-national citizenship, although it is still complementary to national citizenships. EU citizens enjoy rights that have been expanded, modified, and reinterpreted in light of the EU integration process. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been a driving force in this process. This twentieth anniversary has provided the occasio for this special issue. Indeed, much has happened over the last two decades. The Maastricht Treaty entered into force on the heels of German reunification, and afterwards, a series of EU treaties followed: The Amsterdam Treaty, the Nice Charter of Fundamental Rights, the aborted constitutionalization process and the Rome Treaty in 2004, and the Treaty of Lisbon. The Euro took over former national currencies in 2002; the enlargement process led to today's twenty-eight Member States. But the ratio of this special issue is based on other events as linked to the 2008 financial crisis, bailouts, the fiscal compact, and similar measures. In a nutshell, the timeliness of this volume is linked to the current financial disarray. Since prognosis presupposes diagnosis, no further words are necessary as to the importance of this task. It is (almost) self-evident that before taking action and preparing for the future, one needs to address the very first question: Nosce te ipsum or know thyself. Union citizens need to take a step back and ask what they need to be and who they want to become.

European Union citizenship is derived from Member State nationality. This fact often has been considered a “birth defect” to be overcome by either disconnecting EU citizenship from Member State citizenship or by reversing the relationship in a federal model so that Member State citizenship would be derived from that of the Union. I argue in this essay that derivative citizenship in a union of states can be defended as a potentially stable and democratically attractive basic feature of the architecture of the EU polity where EU citizenship is perceived of as one layer in a multi-level model of democratic membership in a union of states such as the EU. This perspective is not a defense of the status quo, but rather allows for—or even requires—a series of reforms addressing a number of inconsistencies and democratic deficiencies in the current citizenship regime.

Most academics writing about Union citizenship tend to compare it to that which they know best: Nation State citizenship. It then comes as no surprise when they conclude that the current construction of EU citizenship is internally incoherent, externally not sufficiently inclusive, and also lacking in democratic legitimacy. To a certain degree, I agree with this criticism; however, such authors often apply the wrong standard of comparison and therefore are likely to promote faulty solutions. As the EU Treaties clearly have spelled out since the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, EU citizenship is complementary or additional to Member State nationality without replacing it. National citizenship is a constitutive element of EU citizenship and therefore cannot serve as an external standard of comparison.

Over the past two decades, authors, many of whom are included in this volume, have addressed several salient foundational issues concerning citizenship in Europe. Others in this volume address some of these issues—such as the relationship between national and European citizenship regarded as multilevel (Rainer Baubock and Ulf Bernitz), the relationship between citizenship and legal human rights (Samantha Besson), the relationship between citizenship and political rights in particular (Agustin Menendez and Jo Shaw), and citizenship and social rights (Stefano Giuboni).

This essay elaborates on the need for shared values among those who share citizenship in Europe, as either citizens of Member States engaged in multilevel governance or as Union citizens. The European crisis has increased the call for such values, and also shows that people contest these values. The issues include: What is the responsible exercise of political rights in national elections with repercussions for EU governance, how to trust authorities at all levels concerning human rights, the extent of cross-border solidarity at the risk of free-riders, and the trust that the political and legal order will remain responsive to the best interests of all affected.

Many European Union law scholars, commentators and politicians consider the creation of European citizenship by the Treaty of Maastricht an important landmark in the process towards “ever closer union.” By marking a special relationship with the Union itself, citizenship epitomizes the growing maturity of the Union as a political community and not merely an economic project of a single market. Citizenship introduces the first elements of a political, social, and emotional bond between the peoples of Europe and their new Union. Nonetheless, the content of European citizenship remains a puzzle. The rights it grants are very different to those promised by states. When looked at in detail, it fails to match many of the most central elements of citizenship.

One of the problems in this area is that there is no single common core of citizenship rights. State citizenship in general marks a special relationship with a political community marked by a bundle of rights and duties, yet that relationship takes many forms.1 Some sociological accounts present a model of citizenship with many components disaggregated and broken down as overlapping identifications.2 Nevertheless, even these theories presuppose that the primary case of citizenship is some type of special belonging or attachment to a political community. Multiple national or other identities do not challenge the idea of a special attachment to a single set of institutions. In fact, they presuppose it. A theory of citizenship must explain the content of this special bond between the citizens and his or her political community and must explain whether or to what extent such a special bond has moral value sufficient to create moral obligations on those sharing it.3

Within this collection flowing from the “European Citizenship: Twenty Years On” conference, this article has three functions: first, explain the political origins of a common supranational citizenship in Europe; second, summarize the evolution of EU citizenship by illustrating the debates about the proper relationship between human rights (for everyone) and citizenship rights (for EU citizens only) and about the relationship between national and EU citizenship (or national and EU law), debates occurring within a context of the ever-expanding scope of EU law; third, provide a new perspective on the debates about EU citizenship's finalité politique or political objectives by placing EU citizenship in a comparative perspective. The main argument of the first section is that the goal of creating European citizens has always been an essential element of the European project, rather than an afterthought accidentally introduced in the Maastricht Treaty. Hence the conference title of “Twenty Years On” is flawed; “Sixty Years On” (dating the genesis of European citizenship not to the 1990s but rather, correctly, to the 1950s) would be more appropriate. This article's second section describes the expanding scope and growth of supranational citizenship rights from workers to movers to citizens; the main idea is that this continuing expansion and growth of EU citizenship should mean the end of reverse discrimination, in which national law disadvantages those who cannot appeal to EU law but must rely on national law. The main argument of the third section is that EU citizenship is not sui generis or without precedent but rather should be seen as one manifestation of the ubiquitous tension between unity and diversity, a tension present within any political community but manifest most clearly in political systems (such as the EU and federal states) characterized by multilevel citizenship.

The history of the European Union has been fraught with constant friction between the sovereignty of the Member States and the supranational powers of the Union, with the Union gaining terrain in fields of law traditionally belonging to the Member States. Despite this tension, certain legal fields are steadfastly asserted as belonging to the Member States. Notably, Member States regulate the grounds of the acquisition and loss of nationality. The Treaty of Lisbon highlights that the nationality of Member States is scarcely governed by European Union law, if at all. The sole provision governing the relationship between Member State nationality and Union law, i.e., Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) stresses the primacy of Member State nationality.

Reality, however, is often not as simple as such a cursory reading implies. European Union citizenship, once a mere complementary facet of the national citizenships, has transformed into an institution in its own right, forming a symbiotic relationship between the Member State nationality and the European Union.

According to the European Convention on Nationality (1997), nationality-or the term “citizenship” used as synonymous with nationality-means a legal bond between a person and a state. As such, nationality is linked to nation building. Nationality can also be defined as equal membership in a political community, and as a status to which rights and duties, participatory practices and a sense of national identity are attached. In other words, nationality constitutes an important element of a person's identity.

European Union citizenship is linked to nationality in an EU Member State. Union citizenship grants rights to the Member State nationals and may be defined as membership in a larger political community, the EU. Union citizenship is meant to foster a feeling of European identity. The third report of the Commission on Citizenship of the Union described citizenship as “both a source of legitimation of the process of European integration, by reinforcing the participation of citizens, and a fundamental factor in the creation among citizens of a sense of belonging to the European Union and of having a genuine European identity.”

How are we to understand the state of citizenship in Europe twenty years after the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty? When answering this question, I focus particularly on social citizenship. Social citizenship may be understood as a form of political relationship among citizens extending to each collective protection against the financial risks associated with the life cycle, including dependency when young, ill heath, accidents, and the vulnerabilities of old age. Collective protection against these financial risks takes the form of social rights within the welfare state, including rights to income protection, access to health care, and the provision of education. Within the most economically developed European states, securing these rights has since 1945 been seen as central to the democratic legitimacy of these states, as well as an aspirational standard for democratizing societies seeking to achieve “the concrete substance civilised life” and the associated “general reduction of risk and insecurity”1 at all levels that the welfare state provides.

One of the reasons for introducing a “Union” citizenship in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty was to provide a direct channel between the citizens of the Member States and the EU. In contrast to many other international organizations, the role of the individual has been central to the European project since its inception. In its famous 1962 judgment given in Van Gend en Loos,1 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) underscored the importance of the “vigilance of individuals concerned” seeking to protect their European rights in the new legal order through judicial control.2 The right to directly vote on the representatives of the European Parliament had already been introduced in the 1970s. The citizens of the Member States were thus equipped with two classic forms of political participation even prior to the introduction of Union citizenship: law making and the legal adjudication of individual cases. Nonetheless, whether these channels are sufficient to guarantee the citizens effective democratic means to influence legislation and exercise control of EU institutions in the rather complex multilevel legal system of the EU has been continuously debated.

If you want to go in pilgrimage to the place where your constitution was born, you should go to the mountains were the resistance fighters were killed, to the prisons where they were jailed, to the fields where they were hanged. Wherever an Italian died trying to win back the freedom and dignity of our nation, there you should go, young Italians, because it was there that your constitution was born.

– Piero Calamandrei1

European citizenship celebrated its twentieth anniversary during the most difficult and uncertain moment of the Union's crisis. The real economy has now been fully saturated by the financial crisis far beyond the borders of the Euro-Mediterranean area, with devastating social effects in those countries most affected. The prolonged vertical drop of the gross domestic product in Greece—the epicenter of the crisis—has been intertwined with a dramatic and unprecedented growth of levels of unemployment and social suffering in a vortex destructive to the point of validating the perception, now widespread not only within the bewildered public opinion of that unfortunate country, that the “rescue” of the Union has been based on a cure that is worse than the disease. The recent general elections in Italy, a country key for the stability and indeed the survival of the Euro-zone, have produced a situation of fragmentation and political instability that is both unprecedented and disquieting. Among the few elements of certainty in Italy can be found a widespread Euro-skepticism, if not an openly anti-European mood, that is also unprecedented in the history of the country's public opinion, which historically is among the most favorable towards a strengthening of the integration process. With the worsening of the economic and social crisis, the very tenacious confidence in Europe as a positive “external constraint” which has supported Italy's efforts towards reforms, commencing with its admission into the Euro-zone in the latter 1990s until the most recent experience of the technocratic government headed by Mario Monti, seems to have declined. Everywhere in Europe, a sense of frustration and distrust in recent years has grown against the Union and its frantically sought capacity to respond to the crisis without finding truly effective outcomes.

From its inception, the philosophical-legal vehicle of citizenship has exhibited Janus-like qualities. For Karl Marx, the “first” citizenship of the classical world was a lodestone in the edifice of the “symbolic city”; a legally-delineated status that, just as surely as it included Greeks within the unitary polis, condemned the vast mass of the classical population to servility. The particularism within an originating citizenship paradoxically survived the Enlightenment, as a result of which, the figure of the citoyen became the point at which a Judaic-Christian preoccupation with the inalienable personality of man could be conceptually reconciled with the perceived need to maintain a secular community of horizontal bondage within the republican state. Exclusionary impulses similarly only hardened in an age of nationalism. Even the most inclusive of “industrial” citizenships, just as they expanded the liberating potential of socialized belonging, continued to exclude the alien from their New Jerusalem with direct reference to his lack of communitarian, contractual or “accidental” concordance with the nation.

The European Union rides through troubled waters. Its original reliance on law as the object and agent of the integration project and on the “economic constitution,” which the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)—as accomplished by the Treaty of Maastricht— expected to complete, have proven unsustainable. Following the financial and sovereign debt crises, individuals perceive the EMU, with its commitments to price stability and monetary politics, as a failed construction precisely because of its reliance on inflexible rules. The European crisis management seeks to compensate for these failures by means of regulatory machinery which disregards the European order of competences, takes power from national institutions, and burdens—in particular—Southern Europe with austerity measures; it establishes pan-European commitments to budgetary discipline and macroeconomic balancing. This abolishes the ideal of a legal ordering of the European economy, while the economic and social prospects of these efforts appear gloomy and the Union's political legitimacy becomes precarious. A fictitious debate between Carl Schmitt and Jürgen Habermas addresses the present critical constellation, where a number of Schmittian notions seem alarmingly realistic. This essay pleads for a more modest Europe committing itself to “unity in diversity,” the motto of the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty of 2003.