4 J. Shaw citizenship that does little to illuminate the broader political quest to identify ‘who are the Europeans?’.4 Another way of highlighting the idiosyncracies of EU citizenship involves looking at the classic elements commonly associated with modelling citizenship as a form of full membership (e.g. status, rights, identity, duties). It is only in the sphere of rights that EU citizenship seems well developed. As to the issue of identity, the sense of ‘Europeanness’ that exists across the collectivity of citizens is relatively thin in nature, again focused on rights, and it is hardly comparable with the form of societal glue that gives community cohesion to the national (and subnational) polities on which the EU is built.5 Moreover, the status itself remains derivative from national citizenship – only citizens of the member states are citizens of the Union. And yet despite all of this negativity, there is also a more optimistic reading that suggests that EU citizenship could be evolving into a different sort of concept than was perhaps anticipated when the member states originally set up the legal framework, mainly as an additional bonus for market participants. Scholars laud EU citizenship as an emerging postnational concept that escapes ‘narrow’ nationalist constraints of state-based citizenship regimes.6 The comparison with other forms of supranational citizenship, such as Commonwealth citizenship, makes EU citizenship look like a relative success story. Commonwealth citizenship largely withered on the vine because of the evisceration of most of the rights attached to it (e.g. right of abode in the UK), or the non-adoption of the concept by Commonwealth countries. By contrast, we have a rich, if sometimes contradictory, case law of the Court of Justice on the status of EU citizens resident in other member states that ensures that in many spheres of life EU citizens have to be recognised as holding rights under the precise same conditions as nationals of the host state. Furthermore, there is now a discussion, as evidenced by section 3 of this book on citizenship duties and social solidarity, as to whether this dimension of EU citizenship should be filled out in due course, in ways that would make EU citizenship relevant not only to mobile citizens, but also to those 4 5 6 See generally Shaw, J. (2011), ‘Citizenship: contrasting dynamics at the interface of integration and constitutionalism’, in P. Craig & G. de Búrca (eds,), The Evolution of EU Law, 2nd Edition, 575–609. Oxford: OUP. Bellamy, R. (2008), ‘Evaluating Union citizenship: belonging, rights and participation within the EU’, Citizenship Studies 12 (6): 597–611. Kostakopoulou, D. (2018), ‘Scala Civium: Citizenship Templates Post-Brexit and the European Union’s Duty to Protect EU Citizens’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12683.