HCAS Brown Bag seminar on Tuesday, 3 April 2018, at 12.00noon, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Fabianinkatu 24), HCAS Common Room (third floor).
The paper examines the impact of the EU upon citizenship, and uses two cases of ‘shunning’ and ‘seeking’ membership in north west and south east Europe in order to study the partial, fragmentary and contested governance of citizenship in the euro-polity. Just because the power to set the rules on acquisition and loss of citizenship is prima facie a paradigm case of national sovereign prerogative, this does not mean that these rules are not influenced by factors such as migration flows, the measures taken by other countries and the activities of supranational and international organisations. We will see how the two processes of shunning and seeking membership (Brexit and enlargement in south east Europe) magnify tensions within the multi-level architecture of citizenship in Europe. Since neither case evinces a smooth pathway to exit or entry, this intensifies pressures on the citizenship regimes of states in ways that extend beyond the immediate implications of the guarantees of freedom of movement and non-discrimination on grounds of nationality or other relevant provisions (e.g. on visa liberalisation) to be found in EU law. We can use these cases to observe the ebbs and flows of what is often termed ‘Europeanisation’, understood in a broad socio-cultural sense that encompasses not only the enforceable legal obligations of EU membership, but also other issues of ‘fit’ between the EU and the national and subnational levels of governance.
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Jo Shaw is Salvesen Professor of European Institutions at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, UK, and EURIAS Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2017-2018).