178 F. De Witte expression of state power. Member States, acting together in the Council, have the right to decide when and under which conditions free movement is possible, and to decide what the limits of EU citizenship ought to be. This argument underestimates the level of institutional sophistication that is required for a system to be able to ‘translate’ inter-personal relational claims of justice and solidarity into a legitimate and enforceable system of rights and obligations. As Richard Bellamy has highlighted as well, the institutional presuppositions for this task cannot be found beyond the nation state. The EU lacks thick representative, deliberative and participatory elements, it lacks the support cast of integrated political parties, civil society, grassroots movements, transnational media that allow for inter-personal communication about the question: ‘how do we want to live together in this social space?’ ‘What do we owe each other by virtue of our shared participation in the EU?’. The Union legislator cannot possibly get the answer to these questions ‘right’. So we are left in an institutional situation where these incipient, partial, and ill-defined bonds and relationships between Europeans, created by transnational economic, social, political and cultural links cannot be articulated by either national legislatures or their European counterparts. Ill-­equipped as the Court may be to makes sense of these new relationships, it is the only institution that can make good on its premise: that it must mean ‘something’ to be a Union citizen beyond what it means to be a national of a Member State. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.