200 C. Joppke Dimitry Kochenov put it – citizenship has undergone a process of ‘liberal de-dutification’3, it is obvious that a ‘dutified’ EU citizenship would be extra-anachronistic. This leads me to question a second presumption of Ferrera’s proposal, which is that national citizenship provides a model for EU citizenship. If anything, one might argue, in reverse order, that EU citizenship provides a model (and guarantor) of a ‘lightened’ citizenship that is observable at the state level already.4 For Ferrera, the direction is for EU citizenship to move up to the national model. This entails certain questionable idealisations, for instance, of national citizenship to feed ‘affectual and normative loyalty vis-­ à-­vis state authorities and their binding decisions’ (Ferrera). When was that, and where, one must ask. From the ground up, states are better conceived as ‘protection rackets’5, so that an ‘affectual and normative’ attitude to that sort of thing appears delusional, at best. Undeniably, in the nationalist past, citizenship was a reason for people to spill their blood and that of others, and it was a ground to be duped by ‘state authorities’ (who is that, one must continue asking). It isn’t, and shouldn’t be, today. Add to this the element that the EU is no ordinary state. If the equivalent of ‘state authorities’ in Brussels, which is the European Commission, decides to relicense Monsanto’s glyphosate, a controversial weed killer that is strongly suspected by the World Health Organisation to be carcinogenic to humans, in this decision presumably not uninfluenced by this multinational’s formidably resourceful, state-­ dwarfing lobby, 6 there shouldn’t be a EU citizenship tranquilizer around to let that pass as ‘binding decision’. Perhaps it would be a category mistake to deploy the citizenship concept in the first place. The EU is a regulatory regime, not a protection racket, so that ‘citizenship’, which has grown out of a protection logic, providing a flowery ‘allegiance’ and ‘loyalty’ coating to the elementary state function of providing security, is the wrong concept to 3 4 5 6 Kochenov, D. (2014), ‘EU Citizenship Without Duties’, European Law Journal 20 (4): 482–498. See Joppke, C. (2010), ‘The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship’, European Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 9–32. Tilly, C. (1985), ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in P. Evans et al. (eds.), Bringing the State Back In, 169–187. New York: Cambridge University Press. ‘European Commission Plans to Relicense Controversial Weedkiller’, The Guardian, 24 February 2016, available at https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2016/feb/24/weedkiller-glyphosate-controversial-european-commission-plans-relicense. One must concede, however, that the European Commission’s stubborn support for the multinational is backed by some large member states, including Germany and France.