European Citizenship and Identity Outside of the European Union
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.
Agnieszka Weinar is an Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of European and Russian Studies at Carleton University, Canada.
Critical European Studies
Series Editor: Yannis A. Stivachtis, Virginia Tech, USA.
Formerly co-edited with Hartmut Behr, Newcastle University, UK.
European Identity Revisited
New approaches and recent empirical evidence
Edited by Viktoria Kaina, Ireneusz P. Karolewski and Sebastian Kuhn
Discourses and Counter-discourses on Europe
From the Enlightenment to the EU
Edited by Manuela Ceretta and Barbara Curli
The Democratic Quality of European Security and Defence Policy
Between Practices of Governance and Practices of Freedom
Evangelos Fanoulis
Lobbyists and Bureaucrats in Brussels
Capitalisms Brokers
Sylvain Laurens
Europeanization as Discursive Practice
Constructing Territoriality in Central Europe and the Western Balkans
Senka Neuman Stanivukovi
The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War
Laure Neumayer
Conditionality, EU and Turkey
From Transformation to Retrenchment
Rahime Sleymanolu-Krm
Perceptions of the European Unions Identity in International Relations
Edited by Anna Skolimowska
European Citizenship and Identity Outside of the European Union
Europe Outside Europe?
Agnieszka Weinar
For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/Critical-European-Studies/book-series/CEU
European Citizenship and Identity Outside of the European Union
Europe Outside Europe?
Agnieszka Weinar
First published 2020
by Routledge
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2020 Agnieszka Weinar
The right of Agnieszka Weinar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-54363-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-00630-9 (ebk)
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To Tomek, Mateusz, and Malwinka,
thank you for your unconditional love and patience.
Contents
I would like to thank my mentors, who helped me throughout this research adventure: Professor Rainer Baubck, Howard Duncan and Professor Joan Debardeleben. I am also heavily indebted to Cathleen Schmidt for her managerial support and guidance, as well as Mei Lan Goei for her patience and understanding. The book would not be possible without the financial support of the European Union Marie Skodowska-Curie Outgoing Fellowship grant no. 624433.
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 didnt 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 laterdecades filled with existential crises that tested the economic stability and political legitimacy of the European Unionthat 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).
