EU citizenship: Still a Fundamental Status? 3 temptation to take a ‘frozen in time’ approach to explicating this story. On the contrary, we should remind ourselves, by reference to classic texts such as that of TH Marshall,3 that the location of citizenship forms and functions has always been a mobile process, morphing at different points in history between the local (e.g. the city), the regional, the national and the supranational. In fact, we can use the concept of citizenship across all of these levels, wherever there are institutions of political authority. The idea of the link between a community of citizens and a political authority was not really the starting point for EU citizenship. The European Union began its journey towards recognising a uniform legal status for individuals at the supranational level not by acknowledging and supporting the political agency of individuals as citizens, but by giving them rights and freedoms. Specifically, it was through the civil and socio-economic rights and freedoms that are inherent in the idea of a single market that a notion of the individual having a stake in the integration project originally emerged. Much of the power of these rights and freedoms to effect a transformation of individual rights lay in the recognition of individuals as autonomous legal actors within the European legal order by the European Court of Justice (CJEU). This was an important conclusion, which the Court derived from a purposive reading of the founding treaties. In addition, some further contributions towards the development of the rights of EU market actors were also made by the EU legislature, especially when it came to giving effect to the principles of non-discrimination on grounds of nationality and mutual recognition. Most of this work predated the formal establishment of the legal concept of the Union citizen. Only later was a modest edifice of political rights constructed (once the Treaty of Maastricht had entered into force and the constitutional provisions we recognise today had been introduced) and it was even later still that we have come to see a closer legal and constitutional intertwining of the legal statuses of EU citizenship and national citizenship, again largely as a result of the interventions of the CJEU. We will come back to this dimension of EU citizenship shortly. What has been most noticeable about this process has been that the idea of the ‘civil’ (a ‘Europe of law’) has underpinned and accompanied every stage of the putative building of supranational ­citizenship. This looks, at first blush, like a wholly top-down construction of 3 Marshall, T.H. (1950), Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.