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to recalibrate questions of justice in a fashion that is more sensitive to the
relationships across border that the EU has engendered, to which the nation
state is structurally blind.
This idea of Union citizenship as supplementing national citizenship can,
of course, be deduced from the text of the Treaty. It also means that Union
citizenship and free movement are not codifications of a sort of cosmopolitanism as suggested by Kieran Oberman. Free movement, on my account, is
not a good per se. It is a good because of the way in which it recalibrates
domestic processes of will-formation and sharing – not because it seeks to
replace or subvert them. It creates emancipatory potential for individuals
exactly because they can navigate between existing institutional articulations of justice and ‘the good life’. Without those institutional structures of
the nation state, free movement and equal treatment is pointless. Being
equally entitled to nothing, after all, entitles you to nothing. This leads to me
to the final point that I made in my initial contribution. The way in which
Union citizenship and free movement attempt to internalize relationships
across borders within domestic institutional structures is normatively
appealing exactly because it piggy-backs on those domestic structures.
There is no need for the articulation of a European form of ‘being’ that can
integrate and structure its own idea of community and political form. EU
citizenship is, in a sense, agnostic.
A normative vision for Union citizenship
The final theme that has come through the discussion is that this link between
free movement and citizenship that is central in my account makes for a normatively and institutionally impoverished vision of justice. This critique
comes in many flavours. Daniel Thym highlights that the Court’s ruling in
Dano, for example, demonstrates the absence of a robust or ‘thick’ principle
of justice in the Court’s understanding of what free movement and Union citizenship mean. More broadly, he argues that even if free movement once constituted the core of a normatively ambitious idea of what it means to be a
European citizen; the Union has now lost constitutional confidence, and has
become more deferential to domestic ideas of belonging, sharing and justice.
What is needed, then, is a thicker vision of social justice that engages all
Europeans, whether they move or not. Criticism of this lack of a more coherent and nuanced idea of justice can also be traced in other contributions.
Johanna Païvi Neuvonen suggests that the normative centrality of free movement understands the subject as atomistic and unencumbered – which makes
for a narrow, individualistic, and, ultimately, not particularly emancipated,
self. Emancipation, after all, requires the capacity to encounter the ‘other’ as
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