Liberal Citizenship Is Duty-Free Christian Joppke Maurizio Ferrera has produced an admirably detailed and savvy catalogue of suggestions to ‘add stuff’ to European Union citizenship, particularly on its social rights dimension. The idea is that more deliverables, particularly for the vast majority of Europeans who do not take advantage of the right of free movement that remains the beating heart of EU citizenship, will increase the cohesive and integrative powers of the European citizenship, and allow to attach some ‘soft’ duties to it that in its current form are entirely missing. The question whether EU citizenship ‘should’ be duty-free is only tangentially raised, and it is presumed rather than discussed that the only reasonable answer could be negative. While the spirit of this proposal is ‘incremental’ and pragmatic, I would like to question some larger presumptions that go into it. The first and central is that duties are a necessary component of citizenship. However, tax paying and army service, which are mentioned by Ferrera as ‘novel duties’ attached to the rise of national citizenship, and apparently considered as model duties for a strengthened EU citizenship also, are no specific citizen duties. All legal residents are required to pay taxes; and most armies today are professional and thus facultative (and some armies, like the American, following the Imperial Roman model, also recruit non-citizens). As already Hans Kelsen observed, even ‘allegiance’, that quintessential citizen duty, is not a legal duty but merely a ‘political and moral’ exigency: ‘There is no special legal obligation covered by the term allegiance. Legally, allegiance means no more than the general obligation of obeying the legal order, an obligation that aliens also have’.1 Kelsen wrote this at a time when ‘treason’ was still a crime that only citizens could commit; its functional equivalent today, ‘sedition’, which is the legally enforceable opposite of allegiance, is a crime that non-citizens also can be charged for.2 A non-starter at the national level already, where – as 1 2 Kelsen, H. (1949), General Theory of Law and State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 235. See Fletcher, G. (1993), Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships. New York: Oxford University Press, chapter 3. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_35 199