Imagine: European Union Social Citizenship and Post-Marshallian Rights and Duties

Abstract

Writing in 1959, Ortega y Gasset noted that ‘reality is not closed and reduced to the past and the present, but holds open the frontier of the future in which the real will be something that has yet to come into being.’ Ferrera and the other contributors in this forum have opened up a debate on the future of EU citizenship and argued for its ‘renovation’ in the light of rising Euroscepticism and nationalist centrifugalism in the member states. Ferrera shares Bauböck’s diagnosis that EU citizenship has not met its integrative potential. While renovation is not always innovation, Ferrera has laid down the path for innovative thinking about the (future) content of EU citizenship and for the introduction of ‘soft’ citizenship duties which would strengthen the ties that bind EU citizens. I am in favour of ‘soft’ as well as ‘hard’ EU citizenship duties and I argue here that EU citizenship is not, and cannot be, duty free.