This section explores the rights attached to the union status, the way access to these rights is defined and the supranational institutional framework of these rights. The analysis is divided into three sections, which correspond to the European Union’s constitutional development in the form of treaties. These are the founding treaties (1951, 1957), which established an embryonic supranational rights regime for Europe; the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which introduced the status of union citizenship; and the Treaty of Nice (2001), which launched the constitutional process in the European Union.
The founding treaties and Kantian cosmopolitanism
Although it can be argued that European integration has always been a political project, the founding treaties did not contain explicit political provisions. These treaties focused on the functional, largely economic cooperation of the member states. Accordingly, the transfer of competencies and sovereignty from the national to the supranational level was minimal. The supranational decision-making mechanism and inter-institutional relationships were based on the primacy of national interests and the logic of intergovernmental-style bargaining. [50] As a result, the sovereignty of the member states remained relatively intact. Thus, the creation of a common European status of citizenship in a binding treaty form was seen as neither viable nor desirable, and the founding treaties of European integration made no explicit reference to citizenship.
These treaties did, however, institute four basic freedoms in order to facilitate the establishment of a free trade area (later common market). These four freedoms pertained to the movement of goods, capital, services and, most importantly, persons/workers. These principles were later identified as ‘mobility rights’. [51] The ECSC Treaty (otherwise Treaty of Paris, 1951) applied the freedom of movement of people to only coal and steel workers, but the subsequent Rome Treaties (1957) extended the scope of mobility rights to all workers, with the only exception of those employed in the public service. [52] In addition, these treaties also established a community-wide ethical framework for the European Union’s emerging rights regime. They upheld the general principle of equality and introduced binding anti-discrimination legislation on grounds of nationality, race, ethnic origin, religion, gender and age.
Finally, the founding treaties also settled the institutional competences over these provisions. They empowered the High Authority (later European Commission) with the right to propose measures to achieve the free movement of workers. [53] It was, however, the member state that remained primarily responsible to decide on the content of mobility rights through the Council of Ministers, and then to implement them domestically. The third supranational institution, the Common Assembly—later to become the European Parliament (EP)—was a marginal supranational player at this time, which had an advisory role but no decision-making power. Its democratic credentials were also compromised as its members were appointed by national parliaments and not directly elected by the public. [54] As a result, the developmental capacity of mobility rights remained in the hands of national governments.
The ‘freedoms’ of the founding treaties were, in effect, quite restricted. Due to the limited economic scope of community competences, the application of individual mobility rights, as well as the attached principles of non-discrimination and equality, was limited to employment in member states. The right of residency was granted only to workers and was linked to their right to exercise labour activity in another member state. [55] Further, the member states were also granted the power to limit mobility rights on grounds of public policy, health and security. [56] Finally, eligibility for European work permits was linked to ‘recognised qualifications’, as defined by national legislation. [57] These legislative and institutional restrictions demonstrate that the early right provisions of EC treaties were not bound to any citizenship concept. They were pragmatic facilitators of the economic integration of the member states. In this sense, Elisabeth Meehan rightly points out that Europe’s ‘first citizens’ were ‘citizens-as-workers, not citizens-as-human-beings’.[58]
Antje Wiener argues similarly when she stresses that the special rights granted to individuals by the founding treaties were not accessible for all Europeans but only for a well-defined group of community citizens. On this basis, she argues, these entitlements were inherently problematic as citizenship rights. Their limited scope and accessibility undermined the principle norms that underwrote the abstract notion of citizenship (and also cosmopolitanism), that of equality and individualism. Further to this, the restrictions also contradicted the principle of equality established in the very same treaties. [59]
Therefore, I propose that Europe’s rights regime created in the founding treaties conforms to the Kantian model of cosmopolitan citizenship. The very definition provided for mobility rights in the treaties echoes Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan right—that is, the right to universal hospitality. The limited supranational character of European institutions in general and the restricted developmental capacity of the treaties’ rights provisions in particular emulate the model of ‘self-policing individual states’, which underwrite Kant’s cosmopolitan order.
The Maastricht Treaty—cosmopolitan democracy?
By the 1970s, the understanding of integration as a primarily economic cooperation of quasi-sovereign states driven by political elites changed profoundly. The deepening of the economic integration of member states, the multiplication of common policies and the extension of supranational competencies were shifting the scope of integration from economic to more political and social arenas. This transition culminated in the political redefinition of the European integration process, labelled as a paradigm shift from ‘policy to polity’ and from ‘diplomacy to democracy’. [60] A European polity was in the making.
The new discourse that stemmed from this transformation was organised around one key theme, that of legitimating the political development of the European project. The key question that engaged European political elites regarded the need for a European status of citizenship in order to render itself as a legitimate political community. [61]
The Maastricht Treaty (1992) reflected the paradigm shift in constitutional terms. [62] In response to the desire for greater political legitimacy, it introduced the status of European Union citizenship—subsequently consolidated in the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). Maastricht established that ‘every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union’. [63] The status of union citizenship that emerged from Maastricht did not replace but complemented national citizenship. [64]
There was a widespread view that the establishment of democratic institutions and legal status of European citizenship would solidify the European Union as an emerging political community and provide it with the direct popular legitimacy it lacked. [65] The assumption that grounded this belief was a rather traditionalist take on the political uses of citizenship: rights translate into collective identity, and identity produces sufficient popular legitimacy. de Burca accordingly describes the concept of citizenship employed in the Maastricht era as ‘unifying, community-building, identity-building and legitimating’. [66]
The Maastricht Treaty defined the status of union citizenship primarily as a legal concept, which contained a bundle of individual rights, specified access to these rights and set the institutional frameworks of the developmental capacity of the status. In addition, the treaty also reinforced the normative bedding of the European Union’s rights regime. It explicitly linked the newly established status to earlier provisions, [67] and incorporated the principles of non-discrimination, and the principle of equal access to the community’s Civil Service. [68]
The rights of the union citizenship package, compared with what is generally regarded as citizenship, made up a rather limited and ‘unusual’ set of political and civil rights. [69] Politically, the union status granted electoral rights: the rights to vote and stand in local government and European Parliament elections in the country of residence. This was limited to municipal (local) and European elections. They did not address state (national) and federal (regional) elections. [70] Further to this, political freedoms—such as the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression—were only implicitly referenced in EU law at the time of Maastricht. [71] The Charter of Fundamental Rights was not incorporated in the treaty proper and therefore had only declaratory status in EU law. As such, the charter did not provide a binding framework of general principles for political membership in the European Union. [72]
With respect to civic rights, Maastricht granted the following entitlements: right to have diplomatic and consular protection from the authorities of any member state where the country of which a person was a national was not represented in a non-union country; right of petition to the European Parliament and appeal to the European Ombudsman. The Amsterdam Treaty later amended the civic component of the status to include the right to write to European institutions in any of the official EU languages and to expect a response in the same language. [73] Amsterdam also introduced the transparency clause, making the documents of the parliament, the commission and the council accessible to union citizens, subject to certain principles and conditions. [74]
Finally, as a clear indication of the will to generate a continuation of the pre-Maastricht legacy as well as to rationalise the so-called quasi citizenship rights established in the pre-Maastricht period, Maastricht also placed the so-called mobility rights under the union status. With this act, Maastricht extended the right to free movement in the member states’ territory to all union citizens. [75] The so-called attached rights—rights associated with the free movement principle, such as access to employment, welfare benefits and public services as well as passports, identity cards and resident permits—did not fall under supranational competences but were included within the intergovernmental decision-making mechanism. [76] This means that the content of and access to these rights were determined by national legislation. [77]
With regard to determining access to union citizenship rights, the Treaty of Amsterdam institutionalised the nationality rule. Only national citizens of the member states had access to union status and the rights it involved. [78] Third-country nationals (TCNs)—nationals of non-European Union states—remained excluded from the political provisions of EU citizenship. This means that the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam failed to establish a consistent legal basis for residency-based electoral rights: EU citizens had local voting rights throughout the union, while the granting of voting rights to TCNs remained dependent on national electoral legislation and diffuse international principles. [79] The nationality rule was also applied to mobility and associated rights. The civic component of union citizenship was, however, conferred to all resident natural and legal persons.
The consolidation of supranational democracy was also an integral part of the legitimation efforts. Maastricht and Amsterdam set out to consolidate the institutional essentials of representative-style democracy. Direct elections based on universal suffrage to the European Parliament had been already effective since the Paris Summit resolution in 1974. The first such election took place in 1979. Until the Maastricht Treaty, however, the European Parliament was lacking effective political powers and was considered a secondary political player in the supranational edifice. Therefore, the specific objective of Maastricht and Amsterdam was to improve the relative political status of the parliament in the supranational decision-making edifice.
The TEU expanded the decision-making competences of the European Parliament by the introduction of the co-decision procedure and the extension of the use of the cooperation and assent procedures. The co-decision principle gave the parliament the power in specific policy fields to adopt legislations jointly with the council. [80] The extension of the cooperation and assent procedures established a greater consultative and mending role, and thus increased political influence for the European Parliament. As a result, the council was no longer in position to ‘de facto impose its views on other institutions’. [81]
Nonetheless, the co-decision principle did not extend to all policy areas of common interest at that time; the power balance between the council and the parliament continued to favour national interests over European, and intergovernmental bargaining over supranational decision making. [82] More notably, the overall strengthening of the European Parliament’s formal power and relative status had little relevance for the European Union’s common citizenship provisions. The co-decision principle did not apply to the policy field of citizenship. In matters of union citizenship, the European Parliament was granted only consultative competence. Maastricht specified that European citizenship rights could be amended via a truncated treaty amending procedure. The council would make the decision on strengthening or adding rights to the existing union status unanimously, on the basis of the commission’s proposal and after consulting the parliament. [83] As a result, the future potential of union citizenship lay clearly in the hands of the member states, and not the EU institutions or the newly established European public.[84]
On the basis of the above depiction of union citizenship in the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, it can be argued that the treaty approach to community building followed a similar logic to the cosmopolitan democracy thesis. Maastricht and Amsterdam focused on building the vertical relations between the citizen and the European polity. The ‘national prototype’ of citizenship was revoked on the supranational level as regards rights, access to rights and representative democracy beyond the State.
The implementation of Held’s and Archibugi’s cosmopolitanist ideal was, however, deficient in the European context. Instead of building a common status of citizenship that was independent of national citizenship, union citizenship was defined as a derivative and secondary status. The treaties also failed to assert the supranational competences over citizenship and the development of common citizenship remained under the control of the member states. The establishment of the European Parliament, and thus the European citizen, as a competent political actor was also lacking.
Towards constitutional patriotism?
The ratification crises in the 1990s were interpreted by many as an indication of the European Union’s lingering legitimacy deficit. This was not interpreted as a sign of the public’s rejection of the European integration project per se. According to the discourse of the Brussels elites, the causes of the crisis were specific and also rectifiable. The legitimacy crisis was interpreted as a combined failure of delivery and communication. Delivery referred to the failure to translate rhetorical promises and the public’s primary concerns into concrete treaty provisions. At the time of Amsterdam, the economic phase of integration remained incomplete, the political provisions still embryonic and the common citizenship policy only a transitional arrangement. As for the last, the normative and the social (mobility rights) components were noted as seriously deficient. The communication failure was understood as the public’s inability to connect with and understand the process, institutions and treaty provisions of European integration. Lack of sufficient information campaigns and the complexity of supranational structures and procedures were identified as the primary contributing factors.
The recognition of the complexity of the European Union’s legitimacy deficit was linked to a growing awareness that the Maastricht approach to community building had failed. It became evident that conferring rights did not necessarily produce strong collective identification with political order. Although Maastricht can be considered a successful project in creating the legal hallmarks of citizen–polity relations, it failed in establishing citizen–citizen relations, instituting participatory channels of democracy and accommodating mediating structures. Without these, the formation of thick collective identities is problematic. The revision of the Maastricht approach also concluded that a (thin) collective identity was not a sufficient source of legitimacy. Maastricht and Amsterdam reinforced the traditional elite-driven nature of European integration, consolidated the dominance of intergovernmental decision making and instituted a rather deficient representative democratic body. This meant that the public had little if no influence on the shaping of the European polity, including the content of the European Union’s common citizenship policy. In short, the Maastricht approach did not deliver on the putative need to generate a unified, active and enabled European demos.
The call for a new paradigm shift culminated in the commission’s White Paper on Governance (2001). The white paper presented, once again, common citizenship as the cure for the European Union’s legitimacy deficit. However, while the document defined similar long-term goals to the strategic underpinnings of the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties, it expressed profoundly different understandings of citizenship and legitimacy. Regarding citizenship, the white paper advocated a shift away from the politico-legal aspects towards the socio-cultural dimensions of citizenship. More notably, it proposed to complement the supranational arrangements of representative democracy with increased participatory opportunity channels. Improved participation would enhance the legitimacy and democratic credentials of European governance by transforming the ‘top-down approach’ of supranational decision making into ‘more inclusive and accountable’ processes. [85]
The white paper marked a conscious shift from the political to the social conditions of legitimacy. While Maastricht focused on building citizen–polity relations (vertical), the post-Maastricht narrative of the white paper concentrated on building citizen–citizen relations (horizontal). The proposal called for the establishment of deliberative frameworks of democracy. In particular, the introduction of the convention method was to facilitate a pan-European dialogue, nurture a European civil society and ultimately produce a single legal basis, a constitution, for Europe—requisites of the emergence of a European demos. [86]
The white paper reflects a certain aspiration for provisions conducive to the establishment of a Habermasian-style constitutional patriotism. According to Habermas, pan-European solidarity and loyalty are to emanate from a set of legally entrenched rights and deliberative democratic procedures. Constitutional patriotism would ultimately establish the European citizen as not simply the subject but the creator of the EU law and the European polity. [87]
The post-Maastricht era brought about only a partial resolution of the deficiencies of the Maastricht approach and a limited implementation of the white paper’s rhetorical promises. The Treaty of Nice and the Draft Constitution did not amend the rights component of union citizenship, and did not introduce new rights. Regarding political rights, they failed to extend the range of elections covered under the union status and did not establish a consistent constitutional legal basis for residency-based electoral rights. Neither did the Treaty of Nice and the Draft Constitution institute participatory and deliberative-style democracy in Europe. The treaties treated the notion of governance within the standard liberal model of representative democracy. Further, the relative status of the European Parliament has not been improved. Although there has been considerable increase in the use of qualified majority voting within the council, neither this nor the co-decision principle have been defined as the standard supranational decision-making mechanism.
The achievements of Nice and the Draft Constitution lie elsewhere. First, they made considerable progress in consolidating the normative framework of union citizenship. Fundamental rights were assembled in one single text, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The charter was proclaimed by all supranational institutions in Nice (2000) and later incorporated in the treaty establishing the Draft Constitution. Further to this, the protection of civil liberties of all individuals was reinforced. Second, Nice and the Draft Constitution also strengthened the supranational competences over mobility rights and attached rights. The treaties did not reform the overall supranational decision-making mechanism; the primary decision-making body remained the council. Nonetheless, according to the Nice resolutions, decisions regarding mobility rights were to be made according to qualified majority, and not unanimity, in the council. [88] Nice and the constitutional draft also moved considerable parts of the attached rights under supranational competences (EC pillar). Decisions about these attached rights were made according to the original restricted mechanism of decision making, that of the council’s unanimous decision following consultation with the parliament. [89]
That is, neither the Nice Treaty nor the failed Constitutional Draft Treaty implemented the Habermasian model of cosmopolitanism and established postmodern conditions for citizenship. The legal basis of union citizenship remained reliant on the premises of cosmopolitan democracy and tied to a traditional conceptualisation of citizenship.
[50] Nugent notes that the founding treaties put in place a mechanism of decision making in which ‘the Commission would propose, the Parliament would advise, the Council would decide, and—when law was made—the Court of Justice would interpret’. See Nugent, Neill 2003, The Government and Politics of the European Union, Macmillan and Palgrave, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, p. 49.
[51] Maas, Willem 2005, ‘The genesis of European rights’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 43, no. 5. Further, the importance of mobility rights was acknowledged by Europe’s political elites. The freedom of movement of workers was noted to ‘represent a rather incipient form—still embryonic and imperfect—of European citizenship’ (Levi-Sandri, Lionello 1968, Free movement of workers in the European Community, Bulletin EC 11/68, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, p. 6). See also Hallstein,Walter 1972 [1969], Europe in the Making, Allen & Unwin, London.
[52] The Rome Treaties defined the freedom of movement for workers as ‘the right…to accept offers of employment actually made; to move freely within the territory of the Member States for this purpose; to stay in a Member State for the purpose of employment…[and] to remain in the territory of a Member State after having been employed in that State’ (Treaty of Rome, EEC, Article 48).
[53] Treaty of Rome, EEC, Article 49.
[54] The fourth institution, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), was set up as a supranational legal body with the competence to produce binding legislation as regards community competencies. It was not until the late 1970s, by the time the European Court of Justice accumulated a vast amount of case law, that it started to play a greater role in the non-legal, political shaping of the European venture.
[55] Treaty of Paris, Article 69; Treaty of Rome, Article 48. The ECSC Treaty announced that the ‘Member States undertake to remove any restriction based on nationality upon the employment in the coal and steel industries of workers who are nationals of Member States and have recognised qualifications in a coalmining or steelmaking occupation, subject to the limitations imposed by the basic requirements of health and public policy’ (Treaty of Paris, Article 69).
[56] Maas, ‘The genesis of European rights’, pp. 1014, 1020–1. Maas remarks that since the introduction of the freedom principles, the legal and practical restraints on the freedom of movement have been gradually disappearing. Nevertheless, on the basis of Articles 39 and 46 in the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), mobility rights continue to be subject to these limitations.
[57] Treaty of Paris, Article 69.
[58] Meehan, Elizabeth 1993, Citizenship and the European Community, Sage, London, p. 147. See also Everson, Michelle 1995, ‘The legacy of the market citizen’, in Jo Shaw and Gillian More (eds), New Legal Dynamics of European Union, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
[59] Antje Wiener expressly writes that the set of rights granted to certain groups of citizens of the member states ‘was not only contradicting the universalising (Europeanizing) mission of the integration of the founding fathers but also posed a challenge to conceptualisations of citizenship as universal’. Further, Wiener remarked that this intrinsic tension of the early approach to ‘citizenship’ rights was only, and only partially, resolved by the institutionalisation of the status of union citizenship in the Maastricht Treaty (Wiener, Antje 1998, European Citizenship Practice: Building institutions of a non-state, Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., p. 294).
[60] Shaw, Jo 1998, ‘The interpretation of European Union citizenship’, Modern Law Review, vol. 61, no. 3; Bellamy, Richard and Castiglione, Dario 1998, ‘Between cosmopolis and community: three models of rights and democracy within the European Union’, in Archibugi et al., Re-Imagining Political Community; Chryssochoou, Dimitris N. 2001, ‘Paradigm shift: from policy to polity’, in Dimitris N. Chryssochoou (ed.), Theorizing European Integration, Sage, London.
[61] As testimony to the political awakening of Europe, the discourse about legitimacy produced a number of policy initiatives as regards common European citizenship, such as: the Tindemans Report (1975), the Dooge Report (1984), the Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union by the Spinelli group (1984) and the Adonnino Report (1985).
[62] In the late 1980s, the decision-making elites of the European Community proved to have insufficient political commitment (council) and inadequate political weight (commission and parliament) to push through politically candid proposals. The Single European Act (SEA, 1987) did introduce common citizenship status and did not increase the status of the European Parliament.
[63] Treaty on European Union (TEU), Article 8; Treaty of Amsterdam (hereafter, TEC), Article 17.
[64] TEC, Article 17.
[65] Jo Shaw writes that ‘specific motivation for the institution of the concept of citizenship via the Treaty of Maastricht was a top-down [approach] concerned with facilitating the creation of European identity, and even a European demos which could be the basis for a European democracy’. See Shaw, Jo 2007, ‘The transformation of citizenship in the European Union: electoral rights and the restructuring of political space’, in Laurence Gormley and Jo Shaw (eds), Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 38.
[66] de Burca, Grainne 1996, ‘The quest for legitimacy in the European Union’, Modern Law Review, vol. 59, no. 3, p. 359. de Burca (ibid., pp. 355–6) further elaborates: ‘What most of the suggestions and proposals [had] in common [when preparing the Maastricht Treaty as well as in the post-Maastricht Treaty debates was] that the concept of European citizenship has the potential to contribute to a sense of European identity and thus of identification with the Union as a legitimate polity’.
[67] These included: fundamental freedoms and the principle of equality as set out in the Rome Treaties (1957), the Joint Declaration on Fundamental Human Rights (1977), the Declaration on Democracy (1978), the principle of direct parliamentary elections (1979) and the Charter of Fundamental Social Rights (1989).
[68] TEU, Articles 12–13.
[69] TEU, Articles 8a–8d; TEC, Articles 18–21.
[70] This is often considered an important limitation that renders the union status deficient and secondary to national citizenship. See Meehan, Citizenship and the European Community; O’Keefe, David 1994, ‘Union citizenship’, in David O’Keefe and Patrick M. Twomey (eds), Legal Issues of the Maastricht Treaty, Wiley, Chichester; d’Oliviera, Hans 1994, ‘European citizenship: its meaning, its potential’, in Renaud Dehousse (ed.), Europe After Maastricht: An ever closer union?, Law Books in Europe, Munich. Heather Lardy goes even further and contests whether the union citizenship status ‘which carrie[d] with it such limited political rights [was] not really a form of citizenship at all’. See Lardy, Heather 1996, ‘The political rights of union citizenship’, European Public Law, vol. 2, no. 4, p. 613.
[71] Article 12 in the Charter of Fundamental Rights addressed the freedom of association in political matters. In Article 21(2), the charter prohibited discrimination on grounds of nationality.
[72] Shaw, ‘The transformation of citizenship’, p. 155. Further, Shaw notes that political freedoms are expressly provided to foreign residents on the same terms as to nationals of the given state in the Council of Europe’s Convention on ‘Participation of foreigners in public life at the local level’. However, as the convention was signed by only the minority of the community’s member states, it could not provide a universal and binding legal basis for political freedoms in EU law either.
[73] TEC, Articles 21 and 314.
[74] TEC, Article 255.
[75] It was argued that the inclusion of mobility rights in the union status resolved the tension between access to freedom principles and the universal conceptualisation of citizenship rights. It is important to emphasise that this was, however, only a partial resolution, as the union status remained inaccessible to third-country nationals under EU law; see nationality clause later. See Wiener, European Citizenship Practice.
[76] These were included within ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ (otherwise, Third Pillar) in the Maastricht Treaty. For background, with the reinforced European Parliament, the Maastricht Treaty solidified a two-tier decision-making and legislative system for the European Union. This was based on the division of powers between the national and supranational levels. The novelty of Maastricht in terms of division of powers was a new pillar structure, which organised the competencies by policy fields. The first pillar concerned the domains in which the member states and the community had shared competencies and produced common policies under binding EU law. Decisions were taken according to the community method, favouring the co-decision and cooperation principles and the qualified majority rule in the council. The second pillar, titled Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), established a mechanism for the member states to take joint actions, devise common strategies and reach common positions in the field of foreign policy. The second pillar followed an intergovernmental decision-making procedure that relied heavily on the unanimity rule in the council. The third pillar, titled Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), facilitated intergovernmental cooperation among the member states in the areas of freedom, security and justice. The TEU listed the following nine areas of ‘common interest’ under the JHA pillar: asylum; crossing of external borders; immigration; combatting drug addiction; combatting fraud on an international scale; judicial cooperation in civil matters; judicial cooperation in criminal matters; customs cooperation; police cooperation (TEU, Article 11; TEC, Article 29).
[77] Previous treaties simply excluded these attached rights under the category of sensitive issues close to the concerns of national sovereignty (see TEC, Article 18[3]). Nonetheless, certain groups of TCNs had access to civic protection as well as mobility and attached social rights, originating in the resolutions of the Treaty of Rome, such as: members of a migrant EU family and nationals of a third country that held an agreement with the community. See Meehan, Elizabeth 2000, Citizenship and the European Union, ZEI Discussion Paper, C63/2000Meehan, Centre of Integration Studies, Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universitat, Bonn; Shaw, ‘The transformation of citizenship’.
[78] TEC, Article 17.
[79] Siofra O’Leary points out that by the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty, only three of the member states (Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland) provided long-term residents with voting rights. As for international protocols, the electoral rights of immigrants in the member states remained dependent on the given state being a signatory of the Council of Europe’s Convention on The Political Participation of Foreigners in Local Life (1992). See O’Leary, Siofra 1996, The Evolving Concept of Community Citizenship: From the free movement of persons to union citizenship, Kluwer Law International, The Hague. See also O’Keefe, ‘Union citizenship’; Wiener, European Citizenship Practice.
[80] Maastricht also improved the European Parliament’s position vis-a-vis the European Commission. Parliamentary approval was henceforth required for the appointment of the Commission President (see TEU, Article 189b; TEC, Article 251).
[81] Falkner, Gerda and Nentwhich, Michael 2000, ‘The Amsterdam Treaty: the blueprint for the future institutional balance’, in Karlheinz Neunreither and Antje Wiener (eds), European Integration After Amsterdam. Institutional dynamics and prospects for democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
[82] Ibid.
[83] TEU, Article 8e; TEC Article 22.
[84] Shaw, ‘The transformation of citizenship’, p. 9. See also Preuss, Ulrich, Everson, Michelle, Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias and Lefebvre, Edwige 2003, ‘Traditions of citizenship in the European Union’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 7, no. 1.
[85] European Commission, White Paper on European Governance, CONM 20010 428, The European Commission, Brussels .
[86] The central objective of the white paper was identifying tools to improve the democratic capacity of the European Union. It argued for the introduction of participatory and deliberative opportunity channels to complement the supranational institution of representation. This was matched with a range of pragmatic reform proposals that aimed at closing the communication gap and providing a point of closure for the Maastricht initiatives. These included launching information campaigns and streamlining and simplifying the common policies and structures under a consolidated single treaty (constitution).
[87] Habermas, ‘The European nation-state: on the past and future’.
[88] Constitutional Treaty (CT), Article III-125(1).
[89] CT, Article III-125(2).