EU Citizenship Needs a Stronger Social Dimension and Soft Duties 187 rights of immigrants as a loss in the value of their own rights and o­ pportunities within their communities. Such perceptions are stronger among the less educated and within poorer areas, where vulnerability is higher and immigration can be seen as a threat in the competition for scarce resources or as a symbolic threat to national values and identities.13 Free movement rights have expanded options (freedoms, faculties), but have also disturbed national social ligatures and thus tend to generate grievances which can be – and have already been – easily politicised. The above-mentioned (cultural) transformation of social benefits and services into ‘property rights’ and the parallel erosion of the ‘lively sense of collective responsibility’ has offered, in turn, a fertile ground for the spread of resentments and feelings of relative deprivation. As a result of these dynamics, the introduction of EU citizenship has not met its integrative and bonding promises. Quite to the contrary, it has provoked a sort of boomerang effect. The strategy of equal rights involves generating a ‘we’, but because of the isopolitical nature of the system, this strategy encounters the mobilisation of a different ‘we’. As aptly put by Van Middelaar, the goal was ‘Hurray, we Europeans can work in twenty-seven countries! The public response has in fact been: Polish plumbers are coming to take our jobs and Brussels is to blame!’14 Is there a way to remedy this failure? If the diagnosis is correct, any remedial strategy must address two distinct challenges: 1) deactivating the current vicious disintegrative circle by rebalancing the isopolitical system; 2) making the rebalanced container of EU citizenship more visible and its content more substantial. Only after meeting these challenges can the question of attaching ‘some duty’ (as in Bauböck’s proposal) be put on the agenda. Deactivating the vicious circle by empowering the stayers The rebalancing of the current isopolitical system can be achieved in two complementary ways: through a partial compensation for the negative externalities produced by free movers and through some forms of empowerment of those who do not exercise free movement rights. For the time being, it seems unrealistic to imagine that such responses can be given by creating 13 14 Ferrera, M., & Pellegata, A. (2018 forthcoming). Worker mobility under attack? Explaining labour market chauvinism in the EU, Journal of European Public Policy. Van Middelaar, L. (2013), The Passage to Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 261.