Free Movement Emancipates, but What Freedom Is This? Vesco Paskalev I must start my response to Floris de Witte with a personal note – I am a Bulgarian national, living and working in Britain. As such, I am strongly attracted by his argument that sees free movement as the core of EU citizenship aimed at extending individual liberties. Indeed, my moving away from Bulgaria was an act of emancipation from the perennially corrupt and increasingly fascist country where I was born. Contrary to what Daniel Thym and Richard Bellamy argue, the Member States, while nominally democratic, do differ in their respect for fundamental rights of their citizens, and the professed ambitions of the current Hungarian prime minister to build an illiberal state does not seem to suggest that convergence towards the highest democratic standards is forthcoming. Indeed, freedom of movement is emancipatory in a number of senses. On a conceptual level, EU citizenship liberates everyone: for centuries contractarian theories have claimed that people who do not leave their country of residence can be seen as consenting to its authority. While until recently the exit option has been only putative, now EU citizenship allows us to conceive those who stay as accepting state authority voluntarily. Certainly, EU citizenship should be the dream of libertarians – in a marketplace of governments you can shop around and chose the one which is freer, or perhaps the one which is best tailored to your personal taste. EU citizenship is emancipatory also in pragmatic terms (one may call this argument neoliberal) – the fear of possible mass exit of citizens (a.k.a. workforce, taxpayers, electorate) may deter governments from abusing them. All in all, if we equate freedom with individual pursuit of happiness in a social context that is taken for granted, it is difficult to argue against De Witte. However, it is not so on a more robust, Arendtian understanding of freedom as equal participation in a self-governing community, which free movement tends to erode. Certainly, De Witte (and all of the previous contributors) do not understand freedom negatively. Indeed free movement may promote certain positive aspects of freedom. For example, De Witte correctly argues that free movement ‘liberates not only the body but also the mind from the normative © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_23 117