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European citizenship is a concept whose importance has increased since it was introduced in the Maaastricht Treaty. One significant actor, perhaps the most significant actor, for making EU-citizenship into more than a symbolic concept. However, the Court has been criticised, most notably by Fritz Scharpf (2009), for undermining national sovereignty and legitimacy of the Member States and strenghtening the EU’s liberal character, at expense of the republican element in national democracies. This study takes a stand against Scharpf’s portayal of the EU-as an extremely liberal polity by examining six of the Court’s rulings on Union citizenship. It  answers  the  research question:  how closely does  the  EU-citizenship  align with either a  republican or liberal  understanding of citizenship? The results points towards a greater presence of republican mores in EU-citizenship than one might expect and that the Court takes an active role in strengthening republican elements.

This thesis considers the development of the concept of citizenship, both historically and in its supranational guise. It addresses the traditional models of citizenship that have arisen in the national arena before turning its focus to supranational citizenship. The development of quasi-citizenship rights at the European level between 1957 and 1992 are discussed whilst asking whether, in fact, these principles amounted to a de facto creation of citizenship as would be formally understood in a national model. Thereafter, post-1992 developments are considered via the activities of the European courts. The courts’ particularly activist role in expanding our understanding of Union citizenship by using existing Union legislation in imaginative ways is highlighted and used as a key factor in determining Union citizenship’s capacity to adapt and develop in the face of new challenges. This thesis plays particular attention to the non-Member State nationals who reside in Union territory and find themselves ostensibly deprived of citizenship rights despite being actively involve in the Union’s activities. Supranational citizenship is viewed through the unusual lens of stateless persons and this thesis suggests that Union citizenship does not live up to its ideals by excluding them from its understanding of the citizenry. It formulates a novel conception of rights-based residence, as opposed to nationality-based, supranational citizenship that is predicated on the Union’s heritage of respect for rights and would include Member State nationals, alongside third-country nationals, the stateless and refugees (who would struggle to gain recognition under a conventional citizenship paradigm), with the aspiration of rendering Union citizenship a more inclusive and rounded conception.

The dynamic interpretation of EU citizenship as a 'fundamental status of all Member State nationals' has opened the door for more horizontal conceptions of equality in European Union law. At the same time, the meaning and purpose of equal treatment in the case of economically inactive and dependent EU citizens has remained ambiguous. The objective of this study is to clarify what normative justifications, other than to eradicate the obstacles to the internal market, can be offered for more just and equal relationships between EU citizens within the existing constitutional order of the EU. What defines EU citizenship as an equal status is how those individuals who hold this status are treated in relation to one another. The thesis discusses in detail how the rationale for discrimination analysis under Article 18 TFEU has changed in parallel with the evolution of EU citizenship. The question of how unlawful discrimination differs from legitimate differential treatment under the so-called 'real link' case law leads to a more theoretical question of what philosophical justifications underlie the EU principle of equality. The democratic theory of equality is used to support the argument that the current bias in favour of 'activity' at the expense of ‘status’ in EU equality law is rooted in a narrow and individualistic view of agency. The thesis, then, argues that recognizing the inherent connection between EU citizens' agency and their subjectivity can provide a justification for a more relational conception of equality even in the absence of a full democratic pedigree in EU law. This analysis contributes a perspective which is usually not there by examining how EU citizenship can benefit from the psycho-dynamic theories of subjectivity that underlie the feminist critique of 'citizenship as agency'.

1 Abstract The objective of this thesis is to describe the fundamental issues related to the assessment of the material and personal scope of EU law with regard to the institution of EU citizenship. It follows that the purpose of the work is not to analyse the institute of EU citizenship as such. The attention is paid predominantly to the material scope. Contrary to the personal scope, it is precisely the area of the assessment of the material scope where we can recently observe the groundbreaking changes in the logic used by the CJEU. These changes are described by analysing four key judgments of the CJEU wherein a new approach to the assessment of the material scope was introduced. The main feature of the new approach is the abandonment of the traditional cross-border logic. In certain situations, it is now possible to deduce the material scope of EU law even without the existence of a cross-border element. This new approach is based solely on the status of EU citizenship. In this work, there is also analysis of the potential of this new approach, especially with regard to possible solutions to a problem of reverse discrimination. In addition to the introduction and conclusion the thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter is devoted to a brief explanation of the institute of EU citizenship. The...

This thesis is a study of EU migrant citizens' substantive social rights. Much research has concerned itself with the expansion of freedom of movement and cross-border social rights in the EU. However, most of this research has analysed only formal rights, overlooking substantive rights. In the multilevel setting that is the EU, social rights are being adjudicated at a supra-national level, but realised at the national and sub-national level. Numerous different regulations, actors and practices thus shape the substantive social rights of EU migrant citizens, making their rights especially prone to distortion in the process of practical implementation. Examining how formal rights translate into substantive ones is important to understand how and where the lines of exclusion and inclusion of European social citizenship are drawn. Specifically, the thesis looks as how formal social rights translate into substantive rights with a focus on the local level. This is where any pressures from internal EU-migration on social provision are felt, where gaps in the social protection of EU migrant citizens make themselves evident, and where many social rights are exercised. The central research question of the thesis is thus: how are EU migrant citizens' social rights governed at the local level? The thesis adopts a qualitative and explorative method. More specifically, it examines barriers that EU migrant citizens face when trying to access social benefits and services. The study also takes a comparative approach, and contrasts localities across two member states that can be seen as critical cases: Germany and Sweden. In two cities in each country (Berlin and Hamburg, Gothenburg and Stockholm), interviews were conducted with local public administrators, welfare providers and advocacy organisations. The interviews were later related to relevant policy documents in a thematic analysis guided by the overarching research question. The main contribution of the thesis lies in identifying certain direct and indirect factors that shape EU migrant citizens' access to social benefits and services - and thus their substantive social rights. Specifically, the thesis argues that (1) certain structures of welfare systems (which become evident through a bottom-up study of supra-national social rights), and (2) the entrepreneurship of local actors, are crucial to understanding how formal rights of EU migrant citizens translate into substantive ones.

Benefit tourism as a problematic aspect in the EU Benefit tourism is a topic which has gotten quite a lot of media attention lately, has influenced the lives of mobile EU citizens as well as the EU itself in connection with the brexit. The aim of this thesis is to provide the reader with a comprehensive portrait of the topic, and to explore how is this phenomenon reflected in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the EU. In addition to dealing with the political context and the notion of benefit tourism, this thesis explores the free movement of persons based on both, the economic and the non-economic basis. The focus of the thesis lays on the case-law of CJEU relative to the access of economically inactive EU citizens to the social assistance systems of the host Member States, particularly the judicial chain Brey - Dano - Alimanovic - García-Nieto. These judgments are revolutionary in a way, because for the first time, the Court took into account also the "public finances" argument which has been raised by the Member States for years and the CJEU has always been adamant on rejecting it in favour of wider interpretation of social rights. The CJEU abandoned its previous stands on the financial solidarity, equal treatment and the extension of EU citizens' rights of socially inactive EU citizens and...

The paradox of contemporary migration in the EU is that new actors, rules, and institutions have emerged and created internal spaces where there is a gradual reorientation of the character of EU border regime. These spaces have become arenas where EU member states are re-categorizing, re-scaling, expanding, and diversifying their modes of internal migration control and enforcement. To overcome this paradox, this research seeks to explore migration policies in Sweden, Germany, and France to demonstrate that the narratives about EU common border policy is complex, uncertain, polarising, and conflicting. This paper argues that the emergence of the EU common border regime with a multiplicity of actors have created everyday bordering as a rebordering mechanism of control that threatens the idea of a common EU border, especially at the level of nation states. My theoretical approach is based on ‘everyday bordering and the politics of beloninging’. And I applied an interpretative approach in the analysis of official policy documents, academic articles, media reports, advocacy papers, NGO documents, and political speeches.

The issue of political integration has been one of the most contentious subjects in terms of the academic studies concerning European integration. Despite many researches have been conducted in the areas concerning institutional problems, enlargement or European security, the researches concerning the socio-political diemnsion of the politcal integration are still very rare. This thesis approaches to the issue of political integration from a socio-political perspective.The problematic of the EU citizenship, its impacts upon the European political identity and possible measures to reconstruct the EU citizenship in accordance with the imperatives of postnational citizenship have been analyzed in a multidimensional framework.In that respect, it has been asserted that, if the EU citizenship could be restructured in accordance with a postnational understanding, it would provide an accurate measure to develop the feelings of Europeanness among the masses and thus,many initial tensions obscuring the political integration would be gradually resolved.

Recent developments such as internationalization of labor markets, emergence of multi-level polities and a global discourse on human rights have influenced citizenship practices and challenged conventional definitions of citizenship. While conventional definitions of citizenship often presuppose the relationship between citizenship, nationality and nation-state, as an institution, citizenship is constituted and reconstituted by economic, political, social and legal practices. In this context, European Union citizenship (EU citizenship), which was formally introduced in 1993, has generated a discussion on its nature. As a reflection of its dynamic and ambiguous character, there is a variety of interpretations on EU citizenship that can be evaluated between postnational and national ends. In line with these interpretations, this thesis aims to provide an insight to the possibility of postnationality in the case of the European Union Citizenship. In this sense, the analysis of EU citizenship depends on two significant theoretical bases: the contemporary debates on citizenship and the theories of European integration. It is attempted to combine these theoretical frameworks in a critical analysis in order to consider the postnational potentials and possibilities that the EU citizenship has. In the case study of EU citizenship a socio-historical analysis of the making of EU citizenship is carried out mainly with reference to the official documents of the institutions of European Union. In the light of this analysis, EU citizenship is critically examined according to designated discussion themes. Consequently, in this thesis, it is mainly argued that dynamic and evolving nature of EU citizenship create contradictory notions in its development process. This also reflects that possibilities for postnationality are inherent to the EU citizenship.