One Cannot Promote Free Movement of EU Citizens and Restrict Their… 65 diluting local elections, fears of challenging the primacy of national citizenship, fears of making the European Union a tangible reality and thus contributing to the sidelining of member states were expressed frequently in the public domain, but none of these fears really materialised. The memory of what has taken place and of the institutional choices on offer in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s is thus a decisive one at this moment. For if turn our gaze from the current initiative toward the past, we can easily gain a glimpse of the solution. I would argue that this solution has created a path dependence which would make any other policy choice with respect to national electoral franchise a deviation and thus requiring a clear justification. The proposed Citizens’ initiative thus creates a turning point as far as the maturation of EU citizenship is concerned. The questioning of the idea that political domains should be reserved for states’ own nationals is unfolding. And in the same way that the European Community was not afraid to open local political spaces to non-national citizens of other member states in the past, the time has come for the completion of this process and the realisation of equality of treatment by fully enfranchising EU citizens automatically in the member state of their residence. 4 ) Free movement and EU citizenship are not only about spacing; they are also about timing It is true that in both the literature on free movement of persons and the relevant case law spatial matters relating to cross-border are the main focus. Changes of location, border crossings and settlement in another member states activate most (albeit not all) of the advantages that EU law offers to EU citizens. What is completely disregarded in all these ‘travelogues’ is that exercising EU citizenship rights is also a temporal movement: a movement of ‘before’ crossing a border and ‘after’; a shift from one collective imaginary and personal world to another collective imaginary and new personal world to be constructed; a change in perspective, viewpoint and system of beliefs; and the enjoyment of a sense of freedom and the daring opening of oneself to different rhythms of individual history and social surroundings. In this temporal movement change unavoidably takes concrete manifestation in the form of the appearance of new interpretations of the social environment, a new frame of mind, new questions, new dilemmas and eventually new answers. Member states cannot afford to bracket this temporal movement that shapes the lives of their new residents and their ‘mutating’ individuality either by continuing to subsume them under the fixed categories of home nationalities or by placing them into static and unchanging statuses. For the meanings, interpretations, ideas, interests, expectations and