‘An Ever Closer Union Among the Peoples of Europe’: Union Citizenship, Democracy, Rights and the Enfranchisement of Second Country Nationals Richard Bellamy This Initiative is to be welcomed if only for opening up the debate and prompting the discussion here – which I have found most instructive. This is an important issue that - with certain honourable exceptions, among them the earlier participants in this useful dialogue - has hitherto not received much academic or political attention, yet resonates with many EU citizens. To give just one anecdotal example, last year UCL conducted two focus groups among EU citizens from other member states resident in London and the issue of national voting rights proved to be of far more concern to them than votes for the European Parliament. Though not a scientific survey, it expresses in certain respects a key feature of the very idea of Union citizenship which, as a political scientist, I find can be lost in the predominantly legal analysis of this topic: namely, the reliance of citizenship rights, including those associated with Union citizenship, on politics in general and the state – in this case the member states – in particular. It is this political context that makes voting rights such an essential part of citizenship, yet one, given the complexities and peculiarities of the EU’s political system, that raises a number of difficulties in the European context. There is a growing tendency to see citizenship as simply the artefact of legal rights. This trend is especially prevalent in accounts of Union citizenship, where the key actor has been the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the majority of analyses come from legal scholars. Yet, any legal system has to be understood within the context of the wider political system of which it forms a part and on which it ultimately depends. Not only are laws both the product of and administered and made reality through political processes, but also courts belong to that political apparatus and are themselves political actors, whose mode of adjudication and the degree to which their judgements will be followed reflect the character and capacity of the political institutions within which they are embedded. To the extent that we wish the law and those responsible for its administration to have ­essential © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_9 47