98 F. De Witte to be very good at remaining democratic. On this account, the creation of the EU was deliberately meant to constrain democratic externalities,5 and particularly the capacity of states to enforce practices of internal exclusion or external aggression. In other words, EU law serves to foreclose the capacity of domestic democratic actors to commit democratic suicide. Usefully, this narrative proved appealing for Member States that acceded to the EU in the aftermath of periods of totalitarianism. This project of depoliticisation was massively helped by the role of law in the integration process. The scholarship on ‘integration through law’ suggests that law is both the agent and object of integration, and is used to push through the objectives of integration even in the presence of political objection on the national or supranational level. What has all of this to do with free movement and EU citizenship, though? Free movement is at the core of the objective of constrained democracy. The legally enforceable right to enter and exit spaces of state authority and the legally enforceable right to equal consideration in whichever space an individual finds him or herself, go a long way towards limiting the power of the state to internally exclude certain groups or antagonise their neighbours. It is free movement, in a sense, which disciplines the nation state, and ensures that its civic institutional structure does not fall in the traps of the ethnos within which it historically grew. In that sense, our ‘anchorless’ EU citizenship is the perfect institutional container for a new – less ethnic – way of thinking about the role of the individual in the EU.6 And free movement is how this virtue is implemented. The third and final argument in defence of understanding free movement to be at the conceptual heart of EU citizenship, then, is that free movement is the perfect instrument for the implementation of the core normative promise of EU citizenship. Conclusion The Treaty suggests that EU citizenship is to be ‘additional to’ national citizenship. This contribution has argued that the added value that EU citizenship can offer primarily lies in its connection to freedom of movement. Freedom of movement, on this view, is an instrument that liberates the individual’s mind and body from the domination that the nation state exerts over it; that reorients domestic processes of justice and democracy towards more 5 6 The most recent contribution is Muller, J.W. (2011), Contesting Democracy. Yale: Yale University Press. See, generally, Azoulai, L., E. Pataut & S. Barbou des Places (eds.) (2016), Ideas of the Person and Personhood in European Union Law. London: Hart.