156 R. Ziegler Bauböck lucidly describes a ‘cleavage’ between mobile and immobile EU citizens, characterising the Brexit vote as ‘a political revolt of immobile against mobile Europeans’. But, as Oberman notes, ‘the right to immigrate’ means that today’s immobile EU citizens can choose whether to become mobile in future: indeed, while for citizens of other EU Member States, the choice may come early in life (see Paskalev’s and Sardelić’s contributions) many Britons (cue Harry Shindler19, excluded from voting in the EU referendum pursuant to the 15 year of non-residence bar20) made use of mobility rights in their later years. To borrow Joni Mitchell’s exhortation, for many Britons, the vote to leave may yet turn into a case-in-point of ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. The Court of Justice held in Rottmann21 that, when a Member State strips its citizen of her or his citizenship, the situation [42] ‘falls by reason of its nature and its consequences, within the ambit of EU law’. Consequently [55–56] ‘each individual decision…must be in line with the European principle of proportionality’ and ‘take into consideration…the loss of the rights enjoyed by every citizen of the Union’. Hence, it is perhaps ironic that the prospective en masse stripping of EU citizenship from UK citizens (save for those who are also citizens of another EU Member State) will likely occur without (Court of Justice) judicial scrutiny as and when the treaties cease to apply to the UK. It casts a realistic light on the judgment in Chen22 where the Court of Justice pronounced that [25] ‘Union citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States.’ Nevertheless, as Advocate General Maduro noted in his opinion in Rottmann23 [23] ‘Union citizenship assumes nationality of a Member State but it is also a legal and political concept independent of that of nationality. Nationality of a Member State not only provides access to enjoyment of the rights conferred by Community law; it also makes us citizens of the Union. 19 20 21 22 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3BNvWFA9ME. Ziegler, R. (2016), ‘The referendum of the UK’s EU membership: No legal salve for its disenfranchised non-resident citizens’, Verfassungsblog On Matters Constitutional, available at http://verfassungsblog.de/ the-referendum-of-the-uks-eu-membership-no-legal-salve-for-its-disenfranchised-non-resident-citizens/. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/celex.jsf?celex=62008CJ0135&lang1=en&type=T XT&ancre= http://curia.europa.eu/juris/showPdf.jsf?text=&docid=49231&pageIndex=0&d oclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=60233 http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=72572&page Index=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=1131383