Free Movement as a Means of Subject-Formation: Defending a More Relational Approach to EU Citizenship Päivi Johanna Neuvonen Should EU citizenship ‘be primarily about free movement’? According to Floris de Witte, free movement as the core of EU citizenship can contribute to emancipation, justice, and the distinction between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’ within the EU. I share his view that these objectives ought to be important to European integration in general and to EU citizenship in particular. But I am not fully convinced that free movement as ‘the central thing that EU citizenship should be about’ will automatically result in more just and emancipated relations between EU citizens. Floris de Witte suggests that free movement as an ‘emancipatory force’ can make the citizens of the European Union more ‘sensitive to the structural process of exclusion that the nation state perpetuates’. For him, free movement can be seen as ‘an instrument to problematize these processes’. It nevertheless seems important to consider on what basis free movement would problematize the potentially exclusionary practices within the nation state. Although I am positive about the suggestion that free movement ‘orients the individual’s visions of self-realisation and self-understanding outwards’, I have some reservations about the scope and nature of this emancipatory re-orientation through free movement. The interesting question is what the term ‘outwards’ means in the context of EU citizens’ free movement. Does the idea of transnational ‘self-­ realisation’ recognise citizenship as an inherently relational form of human interaction and agency, or does it primarily advance an ‘atomistic’ or ‘unencumbered’ view of the self? In so far as the normative ideal of free movement is based on the mere objective of individual self-realisation, the danger is that it will foster a narrow and individualistic view of subjectivity for the purposes of European integration. The ‘subject’ that emerges from the exercise of free movement may easily appear as self-centred, rather than as capable of encountering the ‘Other’ as part of its own emancipation.1 1 For further discussion, see Neuvonen, P.J. (2016), Equal Citizenship and Its Limits in EU Law: We the Burden. Oxford: Hart. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_22 113