The Failure of Union Citizenship Beyond the Single Market 105 Connecting to the Union as a whole Twenty years ago, the European Union could reasonably be considered a political union in the making. Union citizenship could be perceived, like direct elections to the European Parliament or the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty, as a building block of the EU constituting itself as a supranational political community based upon meaningful public discourse and a functioning ‘representative democracy’ (Article 10.1 TEU). The famous dictum of the Court that citizenship was ‘destined’ to be a fundamental status arguably hinted at this forward-looking aspiration. A vision of social justice embracing the fight against social exclusion, whose absence in the Dano judgment De Witte criticises, would undoubtedly have been an integral part of such supranational polity (see Article 34 Charter of Fundamental Rights). We all know that the state of the EU is a different one at this juncture. The confidence that some sort of political union would be forthcoming was seriously damaged after the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, as a result of the eurocrisis and regarding the surge of anti-European populism. That is why a continuation of the trend towards ever more citizens’ rights was no forgone conclusion. Indeed, the Dano judgment is not the only example in which the ECJ refrained from developing its vision of social justice: not assessing austerity measures in light of the Charter is another example.8 By deciding not to engage in such debates, the Court signalled that it would not develop a thick reading of citizens’ rights. This hands the initiative back into the domestic arena. National constitutional courts or the ECHR will ultimately have to decide the fate of Ms Dano.9 The ECJ abdicated responsibility in the same way as it handed questions of family unity in purely domestic situations back to national courts and the ECHR.10 8 9 10 See José Menéndez, A. (2014), ‘Which Citizenship? Whose Europe?—The Many Paradoxes of European Citizenship’, German Law Journal 15 (907): 928–931. After the German Federal Social Court had granted Ms Dano (and some other Union citizens who are economically inactive) a right to social benefits on the basis of statutory rules, the Merkel government announced a change in the law, which would ultimately require the German Constitutional Court to decide whether Union citizens can be expected to return to their home state to obtain social benefits. Cf. ECJ, Dereci u.a., C-256/11, EU:C:2011:734, paras 70–74.