Free Movement and EU Citizenship from the Perspective of Intra-European… 123 destination as well as the socio-cultural construction of Europe in a multitude of different ways.4 In Richard Bellamy’s view, EU citizenship does not undermine national citizenship but rather defends it in the ‘context of the normative and empirical challenges of an inter-dependent world.’ Yet when examining EU citizenship from the viewpoint of the intra-European migrant, I am tempted to agree with de Witte that it is ‘distinct from, and genuinely supplementary to, national citizenship’. Namely, the extensive rights granted by EU citizenship have made adopting the (legal) citizenship of the country of destination largely unnecessary, and for Europeans the value of citizenship acquisition is clearly lower than for third-country nationals wishing to legally settle within the EU. In 2013, for example, in twelve EU member states at least nine out of ten persons who were granted citizenship were non-EU citizens while only in Hungary and Luxembourg EU-migrants were in the majority.5 There is hardly any other circumstance where EU citizenship would have such a manifest impact on the lived experience of an individual than the possibility of being a legal, long-term resident of a country with minimal pressures to naturalisation. Imaginary horizons and cognitive migration Free movement is at the core of EU citizenship also because it opens horizons for Europeans who have not moved abroad, but may have seriously considered the matter, plan to do so in the future or see mobility as an option for their children. The imagination of a potential future involving international migration is a way of making Europe or the EU seem real in the mind of an individual.6 It relies on a process we have called cognitive migration where the mind may travel multiple times before the actual bodily move takes place.7 In the Flash Eurobarometer of spring 2016 four in five respondents were aware of their mobility rights as European citizens,8 so the option 4 5 6 7 8 Recchi, E. and Favell, A. (eds.) (2009), Pioneers of European integration. Citizenship and mobility in the EU. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Eurostat (2015), Acquisition of citizenship statistics. Eurostat Statics Explained. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index. php/Acquisition_of_citizenship_statistics Castano, E. (2004), ‘European identity: A social-psychological perspective’, in R.K. Herrmann, T. Risse & M.B. Brewer (eds.), Transnational identities: Becoming European in the EU, 40–58. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Koikkalainen, S. & Kyle, D. (2015), ‘Imagining Mobility: The Prospective Cognition Question in Migration Research’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (5): 759–776, doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2015.1111133. Flash Eurobarometer 430 2016, EC, DG for Justice and Consumers & DG for Communication.