Freedom of Movement Needs to Be Defended as the Core of EU Citizenship 97 s­ uggested that the right to basic social assistance mechanisms (as a corollary of the right to equal treatment tied to residence in a host state) is unavailable for those citizens who do not have ‘sufficient resources’ to take care of themselves. In a ruling that comes quite close to depicting Ms Dano in racist terms as a citizen whose presence in Germany is of no functional use to German society, the Court changes the category of EU citizens that can realistically make use of the promise of free movement. In simple terms, Dano suggests that free movement is not for all Europeans. It is not a right attached to the ‘fundamental status of all EU citizens’, but rather a privilege that European playboys are allowed to make use of. Again, this judgment was celebrated throughout Europe as bringing about justice; as defending the welfare systems against the parasite that is the poor (or poorly-educated) fellow European. Instead, I would argue that it is about the perpetuation of exclusion of vulnerable citizens from the processes that serve to remedy those very vulnerabilities. It is a judgment that legally mandates the creation of a European underclass of vulnerable citizens who, because of their exercise of free movement, are neither politically represented nor materially protected from the most egregious forms of exclusion. This case shows why we need to defend free movement as a right at the core of EU citizenship: something that ought to be available under similar conditions for all nationals of the Member States, and not only for the privileged ones. Free movement as separating ‘the nation’ from ‘the state’ The third and final reason why we ought to defend free movement at the core of EU citizenship is because of the latter’s idiosyncratic structure. Unlike national forms of citizenship, EU citizenship is not linked to a ‘community of fate’ that reflects certain ethno-cultural ideas of a homogenous community, forged on the basis of a shared language, history, myths and ethnicity, and solidified through boundary closure, narrowly-defined membership groups and exclusion of outsiders. EU citizenship, instead, is a ‘stateless’ or ‘anchorless’ idea of belonging and community: it suggests that its subjects are part of something that is incipient, ill-defined, and diverse. Often, this is understood as the main weakness or source of illegitimacy of EU citizenship. I would argue that it is exactly its strength. The absence of a link between the institutional idea of EU citizenship and a specified ‘ethnos’ or the idea of a ‘nation’ is exactly what makes EU citizenship normatively appealing. Accounts of the ‘long history’ of European integration suggest that the inter-war experience and the Second World War identified the problems with parliamentary or national sovereignty. Very simply put: democracies premised on these ideals appeared not