Citizenship of the European Union was introduced to European Community law by the Treaty of Maastricht. The new citizenship provisions reinforced the right of Member State nationals to move and reside freely within Union territory and granted the right to vote in EP elections to all Member State nationals irrespective of their country of residence or their migration status. Union citizens were also granted the right to petition the European Parliament, to vote in municipal elections of a host Member State and to receive diplomatic protection from the consulate of another Member State.
The value of the citizenship status outwith the scope of those rights explicitly defined by the Treaty is uncertain. Though initially the subject of much speculation by both practitioners and academics alike, development of the concept of European citizenship is widely recognised to be confined to those citizens who have exercised their economic right of free movement, with respect to whom the protection of social rights is a necessary corollary to the pursuit of the broad objectives of the Treaty. The Court has expressed willingness to re-cast certain social rights that attach to free movement – for example the right to family reunification and equal access to welfare support, education and healthcare – in terms of citizenship language, yet this ironically serves only to highlight the constraints of the ‘market citizen’ framework.
There are two lines of objection to the concept of Union citizenship as currently formulated. The first would consider the lack of a general Community competence to regulate for the social rights of its citizens as being a deficiency in and of itself, on the grounds that a strengthened European space necessitates a minimum allocation of social citizenship rights. The second, a more modest objection, is that the allocation of social rights within the constraints of the market citizenship framework has the potential to create uneasy distinctions between the migrant and non-migrant ‘citizen’. In the illustration to be examined below, this operates so far as to subject the non-migrant citizen to ‘reverse discrimination’. The nonmigrant citizen is therefore not a ‘citizen’ in any meaningful way, as he is not entitled to the same social citizenship rights that he would receive upon movement within the Union. The application of a ‘market citizen’ model of citizenship is fraught with contradictions when developed so as to protect social rights that could be equally applicable to non-migrant Member State nationals. These contradictions push at the limits of the market citizen framework and ironically undermine the very citizenship status the Court is intending to bolster, by attracting resentment to European (over-)regulation and increasing resistance to the process of European integration.
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