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R. Bellamy
De Witte’s three arguments
De Witte’s first argument favouring free movement is that it emancipates the
individual from the nation state. He offers rather different instances of this
emancipation. One of his examples, that of an LGBT couple denied recognition in their country of birth, concerns a denial of human rights within a
given state. The others, such as the retired teacher from Middlesbrough
seeking to enjoy her pension in Lanzarote, relate to various personal choices
that will be facilitated through freedom of movement between states, some
involving more significant interests than others. He claims that emphasis on
nationality only provides public recognition to individuals on the basis of a
single dimension that ignores or even suppresses the other dimensions of
people’s lives – as he puts it, in a statement I find extraordinary, ‘the nation
state’s mode of social integration reduces the incredibly complex individual
to a one-dimensional being.’ This hyperbole grossly mischaracterises the
role of nationality within the public cultures of the member states, all of
which are constitutional democracies. It is not as if the retired teacher is
obliged by UK law to only spend her pension on holidaying in an approved
British seaside resort with suitably grey weather and wearing a hat displaying the Union Jack. The legal systems of most member states uphold rights
to as diverse a range of life style choices as are to be found across the EU,
even if all states fall short in certain respects, some more egregiously than
others. Yet all these rights require a political infrastructure to determine and
enforce them. This infrastructure involves citizens of any polity in a complex set of mutual obligations, that in the case of securing many rights –
such as pensions – require a degree of solidarity among them. Emancipation
from these sorts of bonds constitutes a form of free-riding that is ultimately
self-defeating for all but a privileged few. For these very bonds make the
rights individuals claim possible in the first place.3 The retired teacher would
not wish to go to Lanzarote if such an infrastructure was not in place that
ensured a system of property rights sufficient to allow her holiday home to
be built and uphold her civil rights to personal security once there, and
would not have a pension enabling her to do so in the first place if she had
not worked under a similar regime in the UK. Any system of free movement, therefore, has to be such that it respects and upholds the two systems
of citizenship rights that make her movement from one to the other possible
in the first place.
3
I have criticised a somewhat similar argument to de Witte’s by Dimitry
Kochenov in Bellamy, R. (2015), ‘A Duty Free Europe? What’s Wrong with
Kochenov’s Account of EU Citizenship Rights’, European Law Review 21 (4):
558–565.
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