EU Citizenship, Free Movement and Emancipation: A Rejoinder 171 unfolding at the Union’s borders (and within the Union’s borders) to a problem that is created by free movement and Union citizenship conflates two – admittedly intertwined – processes. Borders matter. Borders construct polities and engender certain relationships. And those relationships matter for the way in which we attribute rights and obligations. Many of us would not feel particularly inclined to share our resources with, say, a Russian oligarch. Most of us, conversely, would give up just about anything for the sake of our children or partner. Between these two extreme poles, our commitment to others depends on a range of factors – from the agapistic reflex that extreme suffering generates, to ideas of historical, ethnic, linguistic communities and from those revolving around sexual orientation, gender or political preferences to those created by shared institutional frameworks. On this relational account, the creation of the EU is, in its simplest form, the institutionalization of new relationships between citizens across borders. Something links the Polish national to the Belgian national that does not include their Ukrainian (or Australian, Ecuadorian, Senegalese) neighbour. The relationships generated by Union citizenship, in other words, must mean something – in my account primarily a shared commitment towards opening up national communities. That does not, of course, mean that non-EU citizens ought to be treated poorly, that they are somehow undeserving of protection, admission to the territory of the EU or help. What it does mean is that these are two conceptually separate discussions. The extent to which we defend or limit free movement of Union citizens, and the matter in which we construe internally the rights and obligations of those EU citizens based on their inter-personal relationship as institutionalized by EU citizenship, has little to do with how we treat those outside our borders of membership. Conditions, obligations, and rights of membership are bounded: they include members, and exclude non-members. This applies to book clubs, terrorist organisations, and transnational political communities. What we owe refugees fleeing war in atrocious and hazardous circumstances is a question that is distinct from the question what we owe fellow European citizens. The difference – which also explains why the former is so difficult to answer legitimately and authoritatively – is that one of these questions has been institutionalized, and the other has not: we have legal norms and institutional structures that translate the illdefined bond between Europeans into Union citizenship. And that institutionalization, in turn, is only possible once we accept that borders matter. Not as instruments to keep people out, but as instruments to solidify the relationships between those inside the borders. This also means that, contrary to Glyn Morgan’s suggestion, if the UK were to leave the EU its citizens cannot remain Union citizens, and cannot derive rights and obligations under that heading.