48 R. Bellamy democratic qualities – not least in treating all subject to them as political equals, whose interests deserve to be given equal consideration, with the laws applying equally to all –it is important that the law and the rights it embodies should be part and parcel of a democratic polity. It is for this reason that political rights are the defining attribute of citizenship. They form the ‘right of rights’ since they provide the means whereby citizens can ultimately enact and uphold – both directly and indirectly – all their other rights and assure they have the democratic virtues of showing them equal concern and respect with other citizens. In sum, the very features associated with the rule of law arise from the process of democratization and its accompanying effects on the legal system. It will be objected that rights serve as constraints on democracy and ‘majority tyranny’. However, this slogan proves empirically mistaken and overlooks the obvious fact that the main danger to rights comes from minority rule. Democracy has been instrumentally promotive of rights precisely because it obliges rulers to be responsive to as many of the ruled as possible. In so doing, it forces politicians to appeal as far as possible to interests and ideals that are equally and widely shared rather than simply to the narrow sectional interests and ideals of privileged minorities. At the same time, the democratic process engages citizens in reciprocal relations with each other. By endorsing the public polices needed to promote rights –such as a criminal and penal system, health care, schools, pensions, social security and so on – they also sign up to the correlative duties needed to sustain these policies, such as paying taxes. This argument might seem to lead inexorably to support for the Initiative. Yet, that moves too fast. For, as I noted, the EU political system is notoriously complex and renders the relationship between citizenship and political rights more complicated as a result. European citizenship is accessed through national citizenship which, as the Treaty notes, it is designed to be ‘additional to’ rather than to ‘replace’. This position is consistent with the EU’s declared ambition to promote ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ rather than to create a ‘European people’. Accordingly, Union citizenship does not so much create access to EU level goods and services as ensure that its possessors are not discriminated against on grounds of nationality when they move to another member state. So conceived, Union citizenship serves to promote mutual respect between the citizens of the different member states by making them all potential citizens or dual citizens of all the other member states should they move to any one of them, at least so far as the four freedoms that are central to the EU are concerned. However, for this mutual respect to operate, it is important that Union citizenship does not undermine the democratic systems of the member states on which