A citizen is "by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory [...]". Hannah Arendt asserted thus, in 1968, that the concept of citizenship is necessarily a national enterprise, an assertion that has long been taken for granted both at popular and scholar levels. However, in order to study whether this conventional view is questionable or not, we need to make an attempt to define the much controversial concept of "citizenship". Indeed, the primary study of the different angles of citizenship, and the way they all are bound to the concept of "nation-state", seems the best way to understand how extraordinary a challenge to this view the emergence of a transnational "European citizenship" is nowadays.
[...] What is more, whereas trying to emphasise a European common identity to reinforce citizenship in the EU, the European Commission should maybe try to enhance this very diversity that could provide the traditional concept with another challenge, which is to deal at multiple levels. The Eurobarometer polls indicates that a multi-layered citizenship can be a better tool to define how EU citizens see themselves. The European citizenship might thus only fully fulfill its transnational challenge to the concept by offering a multi-level citizenship that would take into account flows, associations, networks, more than territoriality at a national, just as well as European or local level. [...]
[...] Bibliography Books -Meehan, Elizabeth, Citizenship and the European Community. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage publications, reprinted in 1994. -Ong , Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship : the cultural logics of transnationality.Duke University Press Treaty Treaty on the European Union, Part Two, art.17-22. Papers -Bosniak, Linda, Citizenship Denationalized, Indiana Journal of Global Law Studies, Vol available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=232082 -Painter, Joe, Multi-level Citizenship, Identity and regions in Contemporary Europe, forthcoming in Anderson, J., (ed.) Transnational Democracy, London, Routledge 2002. also available at www.dur.ac.uk/j.m.painter/Multilevel%20citizenship.pdf Web sources http://europa.eu.int/comm/publications/booklets/eu_documentation/05/txt_en.p df http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/culture/portal/events/current/dialogue2008_fr. [...]
[...] And eventually, the Eurobarometer polls on European citizenship will help us to consider the pertinence of such a transnational attempt to redefine citizenship. I The much debated concept of citizenship traditionally bound to the nation-state The term of citizenship has been defined as “membership of a political community”[3], but there is much debate over the nature of this relationship between the citizen and the community. In the broad literature, two major approaches seem to be identifiable, one focusing on the political and civil aspect of citizenship, the other enhancing the idea of an “imagined community”. [...]
[...] II The European Citizenship : a transnational challenge to the nation- centered model ? The paper of Painter J., from the Department of Geography of the University of Durham,[12]is helpful to understand how far the European citizenship challenges the conventional model of citizenship, and what kind of transnationality it can provide for. A A citizenship derived from the nation-state model The Treaty on European Union agreed in Maastricht in 1992 brought the innovation of a European Citizenship that mainly consists of a package of rights. [...]
[...] The EU has set rights for the citizens to bring cases in the European Court of Justice against EU institutions and the European Court of Justice has also held that nationals of Member States of the European Community can enforce human rights specified in the European Convention on Human rights in national courts, even against their own government.[16] The Court has also elaborated a system of constitutional general principles which must be observed within the Community legal order. On the right-centered notion of citizenship as well, the European citizenship has brought the concept on a transnational locus, that is the European level. And citizenship understood as a political activity can also be challenged at a transnational level, since the European citizens have to participate to the elections of the European Parliament since 1979, which displaces the political activity out of the state-borders. [...]
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