EU Citizenship Needs a Stronger Social Dimension and Soft Duties Maurizio Ferrera Introduction In the historical process of state formation, citizenship has played a key role for political integration. It has sorted out ‘insiders’ (the full members of the political community) from aliens/outsiders, has conferred to citizens an equal status, regardless of market and other social positions, it has stabilised and generalised compliance, sustained social cooperation, the legitimation of political authority and, last but not least, the formation of cultural and material bonds throughout the population. With the Treaty of Maastricht, national citizenship has been complemented with a new layer, EU citizenship. It can be said that the purpose of this innovation was two-pronged: on the one hand, to rationalize (symbolically and institutionally) the disordered array of individual freedoms and faculties linked to the EU and its legal order; on the other hand, to create a new recognizable symbol capable of enhancing, precisely, political integration and mutual bonding among all EU citizens, regardless of nationality. While there is evidence, twenty-five years on, that European citizens do know and value EU citizenship1, there is also some disappointment about the latter’s actual effects in terms of integration and bonding, especially in the light of rising Euroscepticism, souverainisme and anti-immigration (including intra-EU mobility) sentiments. In a recent speech,2 Rainer Bauböck has raised a challenging question: can the integrative functions of EU citizenship be enhanced and how? In a This text has been written in the context of the REScEU Project (Reconciling Economic and Social Europe, www.resceu.eu), funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant no. 340534) 1 2 European Commission (2016), European Citizenship, Flash Eurobarometer 430/2016. Bauböck, R. (2017), Still United in Diversity? The State of the Union Address, Florence, 5 May 2017, available at https://stateoftheunion.eui.eu/wp-content/ uploads/sites/8/2017/05/The-State-of-the-Union-Address-by-Rainer-Bauböck.pdf. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_34 181