What’s in a People? Social Facts, Individual Choice, and the European Union 39 change is responsible for social change. That the two are connected is hardly surprising. In fact, this is a testimony to the success of the legal-political endeavour in the first place. The fact that French men and women cannot imagine a war with Germany is a great sign of the EU’s achievements. This is just the tip of the iceberg of change that the EU has brought into state behaviour, which has direct consequences for what is expected of states in Europe today. According to Philip Allott3, we have witnessed a shift from diplomacy (using all the available means to promote the states’ ‘own people’s’ well-being in interaction with others) to democracy (taking the interests of all into account) in inter-state relations in Europe. In other words, selfishness and inward-looking construction of the state at the expense of others, putting the interests of states’ ‘own people’ above everything, gave way to the awareness of the interests and expectations of others. For concrete people the effects of these developments are as important as they are for the states these people inhabit. The fundamental shift from diplomacy to democracy means that favouring ‘your own’ is prohibited in the majority of cases: a Scot is not and cannot be better in the eyes of the British government than a Slovak. While implementation problems are well-known, the starting point is nevertheless clear. In the words of Gareth Davies4, Article 18 TFEU prohibiting discrimination on grounds of nationality between EU citizens has largely abolished the nationalities of the member states within the scope of application of EU law. Even more, by granting EU citizens free movement rights, the Treaties de facto and also de jure made it largely impossible for the member states to have any ‘immigration’ policy concerning EU citizens. In other words, modern EU states cannot give preference to their own nationals compared with other EU citizens and are not entitled to stand in the way of EU citizens exercising their Treaty rights. This means that from container societies of destiny (which is a synonym for the lack of individual choice) the member states have turned into spaces for the expression of free will. EU law grants the majority of EU citizens a right to be welcomed where they think they will feel at home and the Court of Justice of the European Union is ready to step in to protect such rights by defending EU citizens in their supranational capacity against member states’ claims. This is a bitter pill for nationalists to swallow. Their nationality, however much glorified in primary school education, means much less in the EU context than it would in a world where there is no Union in Europe. This is one of EU’s main achievements. 3 4 Allott, P. (1991), ‘The European Community Is not the True European Community’, The Yale Law Journal 100 (8): 2485. Davies, G. (2005), ‘“Any Place I Hang My Hat?” or: Residence is the New Nationality’, European Law Journal 11 (1): 55.