State Citizenship, EU Citizenship and Freedom of Movement 109 discrimination or domination, either of or by them. My claim is that the EU can be regarded as the closest we have to such a republican system of states at present. Of course, I am not suggesting either that the EU perfectly meets the criteria of such a structure or that all the actors involved by any means conceive it in these terms.2 I merely contend that it is a plausible way of conceiving it and one that has normative appeal as a guide to how it should and could develop. On this view, a commitment to the role of democratic states as offering a context for non-dominating relations among citizens requires as a matter of consistency that states act towards other states and their citizens on the basis of certain cosmopolitan norms, not least through establishing structures such as the Council of Europe and the EU that seek to reduce non-domination between, within and across states in the various ways mentioned above. In this regard, the current support of certain Conservative politicians in Britain for Brexit and/or withdrawal from the ECHR must be regarded as either incoherent – at odds with their professed desire to defend the very idea of democratic statehood, or insincere – either done for political advantage or because they are not that attached to democracy in the first place. I make these points to indicate how one can be opposed to the populist nationalist rhetoric of those critical of the very idea of the EU and of free movement within it, without necessarily being opposed to the idea of democratic statehood. On the contrary, one can regard the EU as existing to support democratic statehood in a variety of ways rather than as supplanting and substituting for it. From this perspective, the linkage of Union citizenship to member state citizenship is not a transitionary feature destined to whither away but inherent to its very nature. Its purpose is not to supplant but to supplement member state citizenship in two main ways: first, it allows free movement between states in ways that involve showing equal concern and respect to the citizenship regimes of both the host state and that state of origin; second, it gives citizens a direct say in the supranational structures to ensure they show them equal concern and respect as citizens of distinct member states. As we shall see, this is very different to the characterisation that Floris de Witte offers. 2 For a critique of current EU economic and monetary policies from this perspective, see Bellamy, R. & A. Weale (2015), ‘Political Legitimacy and European Monetary Union: Contracts, Constitutionalism and the Normative Logic of Two-Level Games’, Journal of European Public Policy 22 (2): 257–274.