Freedom of Movement Needs to Be Defended as the Core of EU Citizenship Floris De Witte Freedom of movement is under attack from different sides. It is under attack politically in different Member States due to its alleged effect on the sustainability of the welfare state; it is under attack legally by the CJEU’s retrenchment of the rights of the poorest of Europe’s citizens; and it is under attack conceptually by those scholars and politicians who wish to understand EU citizenship to be primarily about the connection between all Member State nationals and the EU rather than focusing on the rights of mobile citizens alone. In all these accounts, the main fault line that seems to be emerging is that between mobile and immobile citizens in the EU – a fault line that the EU struggles to internalise politically and that can be traced back directly to the right to free movement. Is there any reason to defend free movement as the core of EU citizenship? I think that there is more than one. Below, I will argue that EU citizenship should be primarily about free movement as a) it emancipates the individual from the nation state; b) it serves to recalibrate questions of justice and democracy in a more appropriate manner; and c) it lacks the ties to a homogenous political ‘community of fate’ that perpetuate significant exclusionary practices. For these reasons, free movement is the central thing that EU citizenship should be about: it is what makes EU citizenship distinctive from, and genuinely supplementary to, national citizenship. Free movement as emancipation Free movement is often understood in terms of its economic costs and benefits to the Member States of the EU. But we see something very different when we change the lens through which we look at free movement from one that is preoccupied with its effect on states to one that looks at its effect on the individual. From the latter perspective, freedom of movement is primarily about exactly that: the freedom to move out of one’s own state and to choose a different type of life in a different type of place. Thus understood, free movement is an emancipatory force. It allows individuals to live their lives unencumbered by the limits that their place of birth imposes on them, © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_19 93