European Citizenship and Identity Outside of the European Union

Europe Outside Europe?

Agnieszka Weinar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351006286
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically engages with the concept of European identity and citizenship, and the role of the European Union in diaspora, membership and emigration policies.

It presents original research on European governance of emigration and citizenship and considers European integration in a global context. It questions whether there can be a European diaspora outside the European Union, if European governance of emigration is possible, and whether the EU can or should govern its diasporas in the global era. By engaging with concepts of European citizenship, diaspora and identity, the author examines the weak meaning of Europe for EU nationals living abroad and finds that European public spaces, present and sustained within the European Union territory, are largely not exported outside of it. Equal treatment and equal rights become empty concepts for Europeans leaving the European Union as they lose their European citizenship.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European studies, migration studies, American and Canadian studies, and the sociology of migration.

1 Introduction

What this book is about

On a warm May 1st evening in 2004, I was standing in the doorway of a Berkeley house in the hills overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. I was a junior Fulbright scholar, spending a year at the University of California, Berkeley to work on my thesis. I was waiting impatiently for my guests: two dozen other young researchers and their partners, most of them from Western Europe. We all came from different European countries and between us we spoke about 12 different languages, yet there was something intangible that strongly connected us. My guests were coming to celebrate with me one of the most important days in the history of my home country. I called it the E-Day party; the day Poland joined the European Union (EU). They didn’t think it was funny or strange of me to throw a party on that occasion. On the contrary, they shared that feeling of history-in-the-making. For them, it was the day they would be able to welcome me into their fold as one of their own, a European citizen.

That memory of that day, of all of us Europeans in the United States finding something in common, finding meaning in the European Union to the point that we participated in a party in its honour, stayed with me for decades. This book is an attempt to answer the questions that came to me at that time: Who are we, Europeans, as a community? What links European-level governance to individuals living outside of the European Union? What should those relationships be based upon?

Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, there is now little debate on these topics; academic exchanges discussing them are no longer as vibrant as they were at the turn of the century. The highest levels of late scholarly engagement regarding emerging European citizenship, European demos, European political identity, and European society were witnessed in the 1990s and early 2000s, along with the greatest number of works to approach EU citizenship using normative theories of citizenship (Olsen 2012). The debates saw a cautious optimism in the air, along with curiosity about what effects this evolving political experiment might have on the social fabric of European nation states. Nearly two decades later—decades filled with existential crises that tested the economic stability and political legitimacy of the European Union—that optimism has dissipated, and nationalism is on the rise. The question posed by scholars nowadays focus more on the practical and legal ramifications of Brexit on EU citizens, rather than more ephemeral questions regarding European demos. The Brexit debate has, however, helped in defining what European citizenship really is, and what rights UK citizens might have in the future (Muir and Cambien 2018).

This is the context in which the proposed discussion on a non-EU based nexus between European citizenship and identity will be considered. In this book I do not aspire to discuss the normative framework of citizenship or measure the European citizenship applying it. I subscribe to the view that EU citizenship has grown to be a political category of its own, not comparable or measurable with broader citizenship theories (Olsen 2012). I am less interested in understanding the substance of EU citizenship, than in assessing the effects of citizenship on EU nationals living outside the European Union. The guiding underlying assumption that there is a clear discursive link between the legal and identitarian dimensions of European citizenship. Thus, I want to explore the policies and politics that strengthen, or weaken, those links by examining a specific empirical case study—that of European immigrants in Canada.

Guiding my investigation are several key questions: Does European identification exist outside of the European Union? Can we speak of European emigration and associated diasporas, or are we bound to national categories, forced to deny the existence of the EU as an entity offering citizenship? What is the future of communities of EU citizens living outside of the European Union in an age of increased mobility and diversity? What can we make of the recent phenomenon of grass-root communities of emigrated EU citizens, of varying nationalities, organizing?

I examine these questions by providing an analysis of the specific case of European Union emigrants to Canada of differing origins between 2004 and 2015. The focus of my qualitative research was British, French, Portuguese, and Polish citizens. I also present the results of an online survey open to all EU citizens residing outside of the European Union. Data collection provided additional insight as it took place during the Brexit debate, helping to shed new light on the role EU plays in the life of the European Union citizens living—and in many cases born—outside the EU.

The impossible EU nation-state

I put forward the hypothesis that EU citizens living outside of the region can form European diasporas under certain circumstances. My framework for analysis is predicated on two theoretical concepts: membership and identification in a diasporic context. I define “membership” as being formulated by the legal boundaries established by a specific political entity of origin like a state, or the EU, which typically is confirmed by the existence of a personal legal document such as a passport, an ID card, or another form of recognition that one belongs to a political community. It also comprises a set of political or quasi-political rights that bind an individual to their country of origin. In my perspective, citizenship is the same as formal membership, with its incumbent rights and obligations.

“Identification” in the context of this book is to be understood as representing the symbolic ties with a defined cultural national, or regional, community. I prefer to avoid the use of “identity” in the empirical parts of this book because I see it as a loaded concept and discussing the relevant debates on identity in various academic fields is well beyond the scope of this book (Baxter 2016). I focus instead on the field of political science and more narrowly, European integration. I am aware that “European identity” as a descriptor has been used, and misused, by many scholars studying European integration, who measure its occurrences among the inhabitants of the common geographic and economic space: the European Union (Agirdag, Huyst, and Van Houtte 2012; Bruter 2004; Castiglione 2009; Checkel and Katzenstein 2009). However, in my opinion, in all these debates there is confusion between the concepts of “identity” and “identification”; they are not the same thing. The difference between the concepts has been debated extensively by scholars from all fields of social sciences, and what has emerged is a multi-layered and context-driven definition of identity. The one thing that scholars can agree on is that identity is not fixed, and that its defining characteristics can involve far more than simple ethno-national markers. Individual identity is built from individualized human experiences, and out of a sense of belonging to many collective identities (Bruter and Harrison 2013). Identification, on the other hand, is a simple act of recognizing oneself in one of the many possible collectivities. In other words: a multi-layered identity is composed of many acts of identification (Bielewska 2018).

In political science—the field of study most interested in questions surrounding European citizenship—collective identities have been established as prerequisites for political identity. Political identity may also be conflated with actual membership in a political community. When this occurs, the ethno-cultural aspects of identity are not of primary concern, because in a nation-state they generally overlap with political membership. In this sense, I prefer to talk about identification rather than identity, as the concept refers only to the particular collective layer of identity that has to do with political belonging. As I reject the rather reductionist approach to identity offered in political science, I chose to instead employ the concept of identification. I am not interested in the deep layers and psychological nuances that comprise the individual identity of EU citizens living abroad; I am instead looking for indicators that citizens identify with some concrete aspects of European integration, such as viewing the European Union as an institution, understanding the EU citizenship rights framework, and believing in the existence of European values.

Moving forward, I look at the very specific context wherein membership and identification are formed, namely that of extraterritorial communities with members sharing the same political or cultural background, sometimes referred to as diasporas (Bauböck 2010; Brubaker 2005). In the past, traditional diasporas were mostly ethnicity-based, such as with the cases of Jewish or Kurdish diaspora. Nowadays, diasporas are predominantly nation-based, formed on the basis of membership in a national political community (Bauböck and Faist 2010). Forms of extraterritorial membership are thus important to determine the levels of engagement communities have with their country of origin. I will employ the concepts of “thick” and “thin” membership (Fox 2005), with political rights linked to national citizenship, like electoral rights, making for a “thick” membership, and more soft types of engagement, such as cultural rights, making for a more “thin” membership.

The current state of research in diaspora studies allows for fairly precise analysis of the complex linkages between membership and identification in emigrant groups in the case of the nation-states. Yet, it is hardly used to analyse the same relationships when it comes to the additional layers of identity, such as in the case of the regional entities or supranational states. A few well-researched cases include historical analysis of Italy and Great Britain (Alba 1998; Franzina 2014; Smith 2003; Choate 2012; O’Reilly 2002; Hampshire 2013), but none have applied an analytical framework of membership and identification to the case of the European Union.

I intend to provide a deeper analysis of the state of membership and identification among EU nationals living outside the region. I believe it is important for two reasons: first, the EU has created membership structures which add a legal dimension to national membership; second, the EU is quite active, at least within its borders, as an identity-builder among its citizens, contributing to the creation of a European public sphere (Risse 2015).

As regards membership, the European Union is the only regional organization to have created citizenship and a political constituency (with elections for the European Parliament). In this sense, it acts like a state. The EU has continued to affirm its interest in strengthening EU citizenship (EU communication 2013), promoting EU identification (ibid), and supporting further constituency-building (European Parliament 2014). Over the last 15 years, the European Commission took a special interest in mobile EU citizens, those who were enjoying the rights conferred upon them by citizenship. Still, the watershed moment for an understanding of “European diasporas” were the 2014 elections. It was then that the issue of unequal access to voting rights was raised. Understandably, greater attention has been given to the rights of EU nationals moving within the European Union than those residing outside. In the first case, disenfranchisement in European elections can form an obstacle to freedom of movement, thus breaching EU law, while in the second case, the EU law is not applicable; hence the EU cannot intervene.

The European Union has also been actively pursuing diasporic activities in the public sphere within its borders. Through the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) it has invested in the Europe for Citizens program, as well as in numerous activities promoting EU citizenship (e.g. a European Year of Citizens in 2013). It has also provided dedicated services to support intra-EU mobility. These activities have had a rather weak impact on EU identity formation, however. Scholars tend to agree that EU identity has become an attribute of the educated elite that grasped the benefits of Europeanisation and the existence of the EU public spheres. Studies have shown, beyond a doubt, that “feeling European” is a widespread sentiment among very specific groups of individuals (Kuhn 2012; Recchi and Favell 2009), while a vast portion of Europeans does not share in this identification.

Objectives and scope

Scholars of the European Union have identified just two potential challenges to European citizenship: that of building fully-fledged European citizenship, underpinned by a common identity and symbolism, and the issue of international migration to the European Union. Both emigration and the role of the diaspora have somehow not been included in the discussion. The importance of these challenges should not be understated for multiple reasons. First, EU citizens residing outside the European Union are recognized as citizens with the same right to consular protection as any EU member state. Second, the political rights of EU citizens are not territorially bound by treaties, so the ability to vote in European elections remains a European citizenship right for those living outside of the EU. Third, the diaspora policies of European Union member states, which are increasingly tolerant of dual citizenship and offer more flexible laws on the inheritance of citizenship, are increasingly creating pockets of actual or potential EU citizens born and raised outside of the region. Moreover, some scholars have even wondered if European identity could ultimately be stronger outside of Europe, in the face of a non-European Other (Bruter 2004), however further development of this idea has not taken place.

The overarching objective of this book is to test to what extent European membership and identification with Europe exists among the EU citizens living outside the EU. Crucial to examining these considerations is an understanding of the binary relationship that exists between European and national membership and identification. More specifically, I want to examine how the issues concerning European citizenship debated in academic literature play out in the case of EU citizens residing elsewhere.

I believe my investigation will contribute to the field of European integration studies in several important ways. First, the dataset presented is the result of the first published attempt to gather information on EU citizens living abroad, and their relationship to the European Union specifically. As such, this project offers new empirical insights as to the quality and strength of the EU membership and identification in a new political context. It also challenges existing research results by, for example, demonstrating that age, education, or mobility are not necessarily predictive of EU identification once residing outside of the region, sitting in sharp contrast with existing studies examining identification in the EU internally. We know from research on EU citizenship who is more likely to have a stronger civic and cultural relationship to the EU (Schilde 2014; Roeder 2011; Favell 2011; Recchi and Nebe 2003) based on certain demographics, specifically national origins (e.g. French are more attached to the EU than British), age (younger individuals versus older), education (more educated versus less), experiences (highly mobile versus non-mobile). My research aims to test this knowledge in a new framework. A non-EU context serves to assist with the persistent methodological issue faced by scholars working on identity within the European Union: the impossibility of disentangling identity and self-interest when measuring one’s attachment to Europe (Fligstein, Polyakova, and Sandholtz 2012; Roeder 2011). In a situation wherein attachment to Europe has not brought with it any tangible benefits, the focus is thus only on one’s perceived symbolic identification. Similarly, membership in the EU is experienced differently because the legal framework is not equal for everyone and rights related to EU citizenship depend only on the member state of origin (e.g. discrepancies in voting rights).

Second, the research evidence I present brings to the fore tensions between the EU and its member states as regards membership itse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Membership, identification, and European citizenship
• 3 Who is a European emigrant in the twenty-first century?
• 4 Between homeland and Europe: diasporas and belonging
• 5 The European Union as a country of origin: a global perspective
• 6 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Index