Case Studies

In order to take into account the bi-univocal relationship between European citizenship and European state space, that is the way in which EU spatial policies influence the structuring of citizenship rights and practices at the continental level and, on the other side, the way in which the redefinition of national forms of participation at the supranational level affects the rescaling of statehood at all levels, I will concentrate on three case-studies:
The macro-level:
a) I will take into account the policies concerning the regulation of free movement of people within the EU. European citizenship can only be effective in a regime of free movement, since it depends on the mutual recognition of a certain number of rights among nationals of member states (isopolitia). It is only through the concrete act of passing across member states’ borders that one becomes a European citizen (Bauböck and Guiraudon, 2009). Moreover, I aim at understanding how the control and the encouragement of free movement of EU citizens acts as a mechanism of government at the continental level and in which way this restructures political authority (sixth expected result). Against a large part of the literature of European citizenship and the right to free movement, that see the construction of a space of free circulation of goods, services and people only as market-driven (Favell and Hansen, 2002), in the present research project I argue that European citizenship is acting as a factor of construction of a European geographical space and of a EU’s territory beyond national borders and this implies the restructuring of national state spaces. The link between EU citizenship and the policies of free movement is political and it entails a deep transformation, internal to European modernity, of the practices of government (Foucault, 2004; Pullano, 2010). The elements of national citizenship are being disarticulated and then rearticulated at the continental level, thus producing new assemblages of citizenship (Ong, 2006) and new spaces for political participation. Geographical space and the transgression of borders through circulations, and their control, is thus becoming central to contemporary forms of European government (Elden, 2007).
b) I argue that the questions of EU’s borders and of Europe’s geographical limits have played a key role in the European and national debates over the European Constitutional Treaty, and I argue that the Eastern enlargement has deeply affected the perception of the EU as a polity, both in positive and in negative terms. This has been evident in the French debate concerning the European constitutional referendum of May 2005 (Binzer Hobolt, 2009). More precisely, I aim at studying the link between the political integration of the EU and its territorial enlargement in the debates concerning the referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland. I will concentrate on institutional actors, that is mainly national and European parliamentary members, and analyze the influence that the restructuring of EU’s state space had on the institutional debate over its political integration (Keating, 1998; Bartolini, 2005) (seventh expected result).
The micro-level: I will take into account the space of the city as a place of contestation and of redefinition of citizenship in contemporary Europe. Citizenship, as the etymology says, is strictly connected to the geographical and political space of the city, the ancient polis (Arendt, 1967; Isin, 2007). In contemporary Europe we assist at phenomena of defense and retrenchement that are especially visible at the local level. The attempt at building a free market, a space where all European citizens, of any nationality, can circulate freely, has created, as its counterpart, struggles over the local space, the space of the city. This is especially evident after the enlargement of the EU to the East and the failure of the European Constitutional Treaty. There has been an explosion of phenomena of defense vis-a-vis the “other” European, that is Eastern European citizens. In this respect, I will take into account a series of events: the uprisings in the French banlieues in 2005 (Balibar, 2007), the reactions that took place in Rome after a murder committed by a Romanian citizen against an Italian woman in November 2007, the crisis that affected Brussels and the whole Belgium after the political elections of June 2007, riots in Athens in May 2010 because of the crisis and of the Greek government and EU’s response, immigrant’s revolt in Rosarno, Italy, in February 2010, and again in Milan, viale Padova, in the spring of 2010 (eight expected result).
Today, the relationship between European citizenship, as a vehicle of restructuring of political community beyond national borders, and the rearticulation of the European geographical space, is an extremely relevant and urgent issue. Indeed, the political and economic crisis that the EU and its member states are facing can be read as both a threat or an opportunity. The current crisis menaces to disintegrate the EU, fostering nationalisms, but it can as well contribute to the advances in terms of integration and constitutionalization of the EU, imposing stricter common rules and coordination. There are therefore clear social and political reasons to investigate further the redefinition of statehood, and in particular of the relationship between citizenship and space.
The present research project is strongly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, since it brings together philosophy and political science, as well as elements of legal theory and theory of the State with geography and urban studies. The supervisor, Professor Justine Lacroix, is one of the leading scholars in European studies applying an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of citizenship and political community.