104 D. Thym is not equal treatment once they have taken up work. The added value of Union citizenship is the right to be admitted to the labour market – a distinction fortified by Article 15 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights which guarantees equal working conditions to everyone, but reserves the right to seek employment in any Member State to Union citizens. That right to be economically active across the Union is firmly inscribed into the DNA of the European project, since it presents itself as one of the pillars of the single market. We may question the outer limits of corresponding equal treatment, such as in-work benefits for part-time workers or the level of child benefits for children living in another Member State, which feature prominently in the new deal the British government promotes in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. But such disputes about the fringes should not distract from the essentially economic rationale of equal treatment for those who are economically active, which De Witte himself proposed to reconstructed as an expression of a Durkheimian organic solidarity.4 The internal market provides the frame for this arrangement. Its pan-European reach remains largely uncontested. In relation to citizens like Ms Dano the picture looks different. Their status transcends the single market and emanates directly from the rights attached to Union citizenship. Their reach had never been subject to a principled political consensus – as the emphasis on ‘limitations and conditions’ (Article 21.1 TFEU) in primary law illustrates in the same way as the compromise formulae enshrined in the Citizenship Directive 2004/38/EC.5 That is not to say that the Court was right to flatly deny equal treatment to citizens like Ms Dano: a different position could have been defended.6 All I say is that we cannot expect the single market case law to be extended to non-­ economic activities indefinitely, since the constitutional frame of reference differs. It builds upon the (vague) idea of political union of which generic free movement rights for the economically inactive were always an integral part.7 Arguably, it is this connection to political union, which explains the failure of citizens’ rights beyond the single market. 4 5 6 7 Cf. de Witte, F. (2015), Justice in the EU. The Emergence of Transnational Solidarity. Oxford: OUP. See Hailbronner, K. (2015), ‘Union Citizenship and Access to Social Benefits’, Common Market Law Review 42 (5): 1245 (1258–1264). See Thym, D. (2015), ‘The Elusive Limits of Solidarity. Residence Rights of and Social Benefits for Economically Inactive Union Citizens’, Common Market Law Review 52 (1): 17–50. See Wiener, A. (1998), Building Institutions. The Developing Practice of European Citizenship. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.