What Is Left of European Citizenship?

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Justine Lacroix
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12311

© (2021) The Authors. Ratio Juris published by the University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which

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Ratio Juris. Vol. 34 No. 2 June 2021 (106–120)

What Is Left of European Citizenship?

JUSTINE LACROIX *

Abstract . The European Union has opened the way towards a new form of citizenship founded

on two promises: one “federal,” the other “cosmopolitan.” However, the condition of asylum-

seekers and the attacks on the rule of law have, over the past ten years, undermined this dual

ambition of the European Union at the risk of ruining both its cosmopolitan and federal dimen-

sions. In this particular context, political theory has a role to play in elucidating the concepts at

stake, such as that of “illiberal democracy,” which is now being mobilized in Europe to mask a

gradual liquidation of democracy.

1. Introduction

“I am not really a Game of Thrones fan but on democracy, I can say: Winter is coming .”

This statement is not that of a left- wing activist but one made in 2019 by the French

judge at the European Court of Human Rights— who stressed that in Europe fun-

damental rights are now being challenged, criticized, and sometimes even ignored

(Vergnaud 2019 ). One could say the same thing about European citizenship. Actually,

many authors are going through a rather bitter time, witnessing the disappointment

of the hopes they held as recently as ten or fifteen years ago— that the European

Union would be a sort of laboratory for a new form of citizenship, variously called

a “citizenship of rights” or cosmopolitan citizenship. In order to understand these

hopes and also the disillusionment we feel today, let first recall the original contra-

diction between human rights and the nation- state, a paradox outlined by Hannah

Arendt in a now seminal work.

Today, there is little question that nation- states and universal rights for individ-

uals can coexist. Yet in The Origins of Totalitarianism , written in 1951, Hannah Arendt

saw a contradiction between these two concepts. This conflict emerged with the birth

of the modern nation- state as soon as the French Revolution linked the Declaration

of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the demand for national sovereignty. In the

1789 text, the claim that all sovereignty resides in the nation (Article 3) almost im-

mediately follows the statement that all men are born free and holding equal rights

(Article 1). “In other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated,

completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference

 This paper is here published within the framework of the NoVaMigra project, which has re-

ceived funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme

under Grant Agreement No. 770330.

[Correction added on 16 August 2021 after online publication: the copyright line has been

updated in this version.]