EU Citizenship Needs a Stronger Social Dimension and Soft Duties 189 While it is true that all these facilitating initiatives provide tangible benefits only if there is a cross border element, their personal scope is potentially very wide: it goes well beyond the constituency of mobile workers, affecting travellers and tourists, patients, students, consumers. Among ordinary people there is only a very limited awareness of these initiatives. The first thing to do is thus to popularize these opportunities among the wider public, disconnecting them from free movement in the thick sense (i.e. work mobility). A way of doing this would be to introduce an ‘EU social card’ (with a number identifier) available to all European citizens to enhance the visibility of (and also easing access to) the various privileges and services already provided by the existing programs. In the US the social security number is not only a pre-requisite for most contacts with the public administration, but also a visible and tangible symbol of membership in the US legal space. Italy has a similar code, which is called codice fiscale, requested for any application to a public benefit, in addition to being used for tax purposes. This number used to be shown on a dedicated plastic card, identifying each citizen (and legal resident) primarily as a taxpayer. Smartly, the number is now shown on a different card: the carta sanitaria – used to access the National Health Service -– which evokes the idea of an entitlement associated to tax duties. A clever move in terms of integration and bonding.15 A more ambitious idea is to create a direct stake also for stay-at-homers in the area of free movement. As has been aptly noted by various authors, the freedom to move implies also the freedom to stay.16 Those who opt for staying do not have access to the facilitating benefits and services that the EU provides to the movers. Why not imagine a scheme offering, upon application, universal transferable vouchers (or drawing rights) that workers could pass on to their kin – in particular sons and daughters wishing to move? Such vouchers (each having a certain value) could be used to access the existing benefits and services aimed for mobile workers or cashed in for covering extra expenses linked to mobility. Every worker would be entitled 15 16 One should not underestimate the symbolic – in addition to the practical and control-oriented – value of administrative papers in forging belongingness and even bonding. See the interesting historical reconstruction by Torpey, J. (2000), The Invention of Passports: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press. On the importance of symbols and everyday practices in EU building, see also the very interesting book by McNamara, K. (2015), The Politics of Everyday Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See the various responses to the kick-off essay by De Witte, supra, ft. 11.

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