Abstract
The Research Handbook on European Union Citizenship Law and Policy is published in the Elgar Handbooks in European Law series. The subject is highly topical due to changing trends in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and challenges faced by individual Member States dealing with the implications of events such as Brexit, COVID-19 and specific issues associated with the freedom of movement of persons. The contributions form 22 chapters, grouped into four parts.
The purpose of this handbook is to discuss the legal, political and contextual factors underlying the critical turn in legal studies and in the academic research on Union citizenship. To achieve these goals, the editors, Dora Kostakopoulou (Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public Policy at KU Leuven, Belgium) and Daniel Thym (Professor of Public, European and International Law and Director of the Research Centre Immigration and Asylum Law at the University of Konstanz, Germany) have brought together established expert authors with wide-ranging academic backgrounds. Both editors have themselves carried out comprehensive research on EU citizenship and have published extensively on this subject.
Part I focuses on rather well-established theoretical approaches and does not provide significantly new ideas. Steinfield, for instance, offers a high-quality overview of the social-constructivist approach to the evolution of EU citizenship, but he leaves out some innovative recent papers, such as Union Citizenship and Beyond (D’Oliveira, 2018) or EU Citizenship as a Means of Broadening the Application of EU Fundamental Rights: Developments and Limits (Kalaitzaki; 2020) on this topic, which are not (yet) well established. Nonetheless, he provides various suggestions of how research in this area could further develop, and readers can definitely draw inspiration from these. One idea is to adapt the proposed methodological ‘toolkit’ to examine the inherent gaps or deficiencies in past and present EU citizenship, including its roots in an economic concept and its present form, from which people may be excluded by virtue of not being European.
Parts II and III focus on judicial developments in multi-faceted case law: access to social benefits by economically non-active citizens, culminating in the Dano and Alimanovic rulings; the immigration status of third-country national family members since the Zambrano case; and residence rights of criminal offenders. All chapters in both parts recapitulate well-known legal discourses on citizens' rights, but they do not contain any substantially novel findings.
The chapter by Coutts on the legality of Member State measures in relation to the free movement and Schengen legal framework provides a stimulating discussion on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the emerging notion of territory in legal studies on Union citizenship, from which readers can learn. Noteworthy is the examination of interactions between Member State and Union notions of territory and territoriality, which could generate further research. The author, in his contribution, argues that COVID-19 reaffirmed the centrality of ‘hard’ Member State territoriality and the ‘soft’ nature of Union spatiality and that the pandemic revealed that Member States remain central as political–territorial units in the area of citizenship. Another particularly interesting chapter is written by Young, who analyses ‘EU citizenship as a legal gateway to fundamental rights protection’ and offers a high-quality overview of relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. She sees the potential for recognition of EU citizenship to protect fundamental rights and to relieve pressure on EU citizens exercising their freedom of movement rights, who are predominantly rewarded for their economic activity, as per Directive 2004/38/EC. Young discusses case law concerning third-country nationals, in which the Court chose a free movement approach rather than focusing on fundamental rights. The author recognises this approach as potentially having a disproportionate impact on EU citizens, especially those in disadvantageous circumstances. Future research could investigate the fundamental rights of each group of persons listed in this contribution.
Among all the well-presented and well-structured chapters in Part III, the chapter by Paju is worth noting, in which he illustrates the relationship between social assistance and social security in the light of Directive 2004/38/EC and Regulation (EC) 883/2004. These legal instruments and the interactions between them have been widely discussed in academia. However, the author's questions about transnational solidarity and the political will to extend this solidarity are even more relevant now, in a cost-of-living crisis, and should be discussed in future research.
The chapters in Part IV are mostly organised around Brexit and differentiated forms of citizenship and free movement under association agreements. In particular, interesting debate is offered in the chapter by Rieder, on the principle of ‘sincere cooperation’ in the context of Irish citizenship law after Brexit and its implications for Northern Ireland. It presents a distinction between Irish citizenship based on jus sanguinis and on jus soli and explains the implications for EU citizenship. Readers can learn about the potential violation of the principle of sincere cooperation and the proposed institutional reforms. This part of the book ends with concluding comments by the editor Dora Kostakopoulou, who, in her epilogue, reflects on EU citizenship as ‘a simple institutional structure validating that non-discrimination on the ground of nationality creates associates, unites and enriches human lives’.
Overall, the volume provides an excellent summary of features, dimensions, stages and challenges of EU citizenship today and seeks to show the dilemmas and colouration of rights of EU citizens, individual Member States and the EU as a whole in changing and often challenging circumstances.
I recommend the volume to both scholars of European law as well as practitioners and policymakers who wish to engage in the ongoing debate in the field. It may be more difficult to follow for lay readers, due to the use of specific legal terms and the complexity of this area of law. Although the studies are of a high quality, in many cases the findings are not novel, but provoke further investigations and more in-depth research.
