The Amsterdam Treaty explicitly subordinated EU citizenship to national citizenship
Evidence
A sentence stating that EU citizenship completes national citizenship and does not replace it was added to Article 8.1. Clearly, this reinforces the approach of the Treaty of Maastricht, according to which EU citizenship is derived from national citizenship of one of the Member States. Consequently, this change closes the door for the time being to the granting of EU citizenship to third country nationals residing in the territory of the EU. The legal distinction between EU citizens and non-EU citizens is emphasized and this certainly harms the status of the latter. In that sense, this change can be interpreted as a setback since it emphasizes the link between EU citizenship and national citizenship, between citizenship and nationality, whereas EU citizenship was often presented as an attempt to break this link: more than ever the first condition to be recognized as a EU citizen is to be a national citizen of one of the member states. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 839
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Builds directly on the “citizenship boundary” literature — Bosniak and Carens on the persistent legal wall between citizens and long-term resident non-citizens.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: the EU citizenship ideal was sold as post-national, but its founding treaties quietly hardwired nationality back in — an institutionalized betrayal of the cosmopolitan promise.
Related
- EU citizenship derives from and remains subordinate to national citizenship (similarity 0.91)
- The Amsterdam Treaty failed to meaningfully advance EU citizenship beyond Maastricht (similarity 0.86)
- EU citizenship was the first juridical attempt at citizenship beyond the nation-state (similarity 0.82)