The Failure of Union Citizenship Beyond the Single Market Daniel Thym Floris de Witte’s defence of free movement presents us with a decidedly non-economic vision of cross-border mobility. It is this normative dimension which connects his argument to broader debates on Union citizenship whose ‘core’ he considers to be free movement. His thinking builds upon the rich tradition of institutional practices and academic reconstruction that has highlighted the non-economic value of the original market freedoms ever since the late 1960s – the period when the EU legislature opted for generous implementing legislation on the basis of which the ECJ later advanced citizens’ rights in cases with purely corollary economic aspects. I accept this normative starting point and yet will highlight its limited reach nonetheless. De Witte concentrates on the potential of free movement in correcting outcomes at national level without connecting the evolution of citizens’ rights to constitutional trends at European level. However, such a broader outlook could help explain the volatile state of Union citizenship at this juncture. I will argue that restrictive tendencies appear as epitaphs of a Union losing self-confidence as a supranational polity, emphasising instead the continued significance of solidary political communities at national level. If we want Union citizenship to thrive, we have to move beyond a minimalist reading. Correcting the nation-state I subscribe to De Witte’s defence of free movement as emancipation without hesitation, but want to ask: is that all? Much of the liberty he associates with intra-European mobility is guaranteed as a matter of domestic or international human rights law anyway, which, together with changing self-­ perceptions of Western societies, considerably extended the degree of private and public choice in recent decades. Gays and lesbians may move to the big cities in their home state to find (relative) freedom – and German pensioners can settle in my current hometown of Konstanz or other © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_20 101