Testing the Bonds of Solidarity in Europe’s Common Citizenship Area 45 level. And no solution is simple. All have significant practical consequences or caveats. Certainly, it is impossible to think about the issue of voting rights for EU citizens without considering its implications in relation to national citizenship. Rainer Bauböck thinks that the proper democratic approach is to make national citizenship much more open to all long term residents who lack it, but who would like to make a sufficient commitment to be entitled to vote. He sees the two things as going hand in hand. But Bauböck also wants to ensure that national citizenship is equally open to EU citizens and to third country nationals. Given the current trend in many states to heap more and more conditions on those acquiring citizenship by naturalisation, unfortunately his wish to use this route towards democratic equality is as far away from political reality as the desire to see EU citizenship rights extended by treaty amendment to include the right to participate in host state national elections. Perhaps more realistic could be a push towards a more generalised acceptance of external voting within the EU, but while this route could potentially offer an avenue for all to participate in one set of elections, it does not necessarily let them participate in the one that they would choose. In other words, from a truly European perspective, both of those routes, which prioritise national solutions over supranational ones, do seem suboptimal. Moreover, they might also seem suboptimal because they assume that the only way of ensuring that democratic participation is not undermined by the use of free movement rights involves direct attempts to persuade the member states either to change their national laws on citizenship and/or external voting in a coordinated way, or to agree – as ‘masters’ of the treaties – to change the terms of EU citizenship itself. In fact, if member states recognised more readily their responsibilities in respect of the common citizenship experience for both outgoing and incoming EU migrants, they might be readier to change their national laws autonomously, or perhaps in concert with other states which provide reciprocity of rights, in order to build a more substantial common electoral area akin to the one that already exists in part between the UK and Ireland. One could then even imagine the circumstances in which the states could agree, with the assistance of the EU institutions, on a facilitative convention structuring these types of reciprocal citizenship relationships. But the member states should not be the sole focus of attention. It seems to me that the debate about the character of the common citizenship area