One Cannot Promote Free Movement of EU Citizens and Restrict Their… 63 2 ) Tackling the democratic deficit without the methodological privileging of the state Once the democratic deficit is acknowledged, questions of how best to correct it come into play. These questions, and their answers, have been discussed very eloquently by the contributors to this debate. The options on the table include the horizontal opening of national citizenship or the extension of Union citizenship. By opting for the former, we implicitly recognise (i) that it is the member states’ business to correct the wrong; (ii) the national character of domestic citizenship should be preserved, and iii) that naturalisation should be the means of full participation in the national as well as European demoi. All three assumptions, however, clearly privilege the state and, by so doing, conceal the fact that the national state is called upon to resolve a wrong that its own constituent organising ideas have created in the first place. All three assumptions also superimpose two different logics and realities; namely, the logic of non-discrimination on the grounds of nationality and thus equalisation (full equality of treatment irrespective of nationality throughout the EU) (the logic of equality) and the national statist logic of turning aliens into nationals via naturalisation along with the underpinning rationale of cultural homogenisation in some form or another (the nationcentric logic). However, these logics are very different and must be kept apart. Certainly, European integration has been premised on non-­ discrimination and to assume that the state and its (national) ways should be given a theoretical and methodological priority with respect to the future development of EU citizenship denotes an ideological point of view. After all, why should not the citizens’ everyday lives, lived encounters and expectations matter as much as states’ interests in perpetuating the national citizenship narratives? And why should not the fundamental status of European Union citizenship place itself inside states’ political domain and affirm its right to existence? True, electorates in the member states may not welcome the extension of EU citizenship to national parliamentary elections. They may react negatively and right-wing extremism might capitalise on it in order to mobilise people against the governing political elites and the EU. But this is something that can happen anyway with respect to any real or imagined policy reform. Can political imagination and socio-political change remain captive of conservative interests which seem to fix their gaze firmly on the past and on the artificial commonalities of race, ethnicity, language and national culture thereby underscoring not only commonalities of interests, commitment to a shared institutional framework and of shared collective practices, but also the boundary crossings that preceded all the above commonalities,