European citizenship: a critical assessment

While the notion of a European citizenship in the sense of a formal mode of citizenship that is specific to the EU has a certain reality today, a significant development has been the Europeanization of national regimes. This has occurred under the impact of the broader context of the rise of cosmopolitan forms of citizenship. A historical contextualization of the transformation of citizenship in Europe points to two major traditions, the republican and the cosmopolitan. An analysis of the current situation suggests that both of these have become mutually implicated in each other, but the resulting situation has led to a deficit in the values of solidarity and social justice leading to a major crisis at the heart of the European project.