Citizenship is an object of enquiry in many disciplines, though perhaps especially prominent in political theory and political science, law, and sociology. Until the early 1990s it appeared to be moribund as a field of study, but a resurgence of interest since then has spawned a now huge literature.¹ As every book on citizenship sooner or later says, there are many conceptions and theories of citizenship, all contested to some degree, and some of which are more controversial than others. Across the variety of accounts, however, a small number of core focuses tend to recur. This is not surprising once...

Because the standard ‘nation-state’ accounts of citizenship are increasingly being found wanting, interest in the idea of global citizenship has, since the early 1990s, resurged. As Nussbaum reminds us, the essence of this idea is not new but revisits the ancient Stoic doctrine of cosmopolitanism – ‘cosmopolite’ meaning, precisely, a citizen of the world. In advocating cosmopolitanism as the remedy for narrowness of vision Nussbaum describes such a citizen as a person dwelling both in the (local) community of birth and in the (universal) community of human argument and aspiration, defining himself not by local origins and group memberships, but by...

Since the 1970s, the view that popular legitimacy would be a precondition for development of the EU as a unitary and purposive actor in international affairs has prevailed among EU political elites. The influential 1975 Report by Leo Tindemans, a former Belgian Prime Minister, in its call for a more distinctive EU ‘identity’ on the international stage, hinted at later ideas of both Union citizenship¹ and attempts to create a Europeananthroposcontained in the recommendations of the Adonnino Report of 1985 (flag, anthem, passport covers). It was within that general interpretive context that EU citizenship was understood and intermittently...

Gewirth’s philosophy¹ starts from a consideration of what is necessary for any and all human action, and it is a philosophy founded on action rather than being, because it is our actions (very broadly conceived to include speech and the act of choosing not to act, or choosing not to choose) that bring the field of morality into play. Action is distinct from mere observed behaviour: human action is purposive, in that it is intentional and oriented to some purpose. In other words, it is not random and arbitrary, as the buzzing of a fly about a room. It is...

As is clear from the last chapter, social and political institutions are inextricable elements in Gewirth’s moral philosophy. Gewirth provides the theoretical and conceptual resources for moral exploration both at the micro-level, in his simple models of interaction between two agents, and at the macro-level, in his depictions of what kind of overall political architecture a society adhering to the fundamental principles of the PGC ought to have. But these moral considerations bearing on agents on the one hand, and the basic constitution of society on the other, are the end points of a relationship lying implied and mostly undeveloped...

To see how a justifiable political framework must be constituted by citizenship, we start with Gewirth’s premise that basic levels of social and political organisation are a fundamental and compelling moral imperative. In this he draws on the Kantian view that the state of nature is not an acceptable option for human beings, since its ever-present apprehension of violence displaces all possibility of leading a tolerable life.¹ Without already supposing all the specific apparatus of law, the state, and so on we can see that a minimal level of social and political order requires codes or rules, sufficiently stable to...

One of the core questions of EU citizenship is whether it can be substantive and not merely formal. For it to be so it must be capable of embodying political agency, and that means that the supranational institutional framework that it constitutes in theory must be capable of demonstrating dependence on agency in actuality. In the EU these matters are often anything but limpid, but we will maintain our bearings by never losing sight of the crucial distinction between authority and power.

This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive survey of the EU’s democratic deficits¹ or address directly the debates...

It was suggested very much earlier in this work that the dominating themes in the debates about citizenship of the EU were whether it could become a practical political reality as well as a formal legal reality, and whether it could call on – or itself foster – the kinds of attitudinal and motivational features that are associated with effective citizenship. Having looked, through Chapters 5 to 7, at the implications of rational agency for politics in general and for the prospects of a substantive citizenship in the EU in particular, let us now turn to its otherproblématique– that in which...

In earlier chapters it was argued that citizenship, being an institutional role, is not reducible to nor incorporates as a component the social relations between persons, and that these must be conceptually and theoretically distinguished from it.

However, social relations are not irrelevant to citizenship. This chapter examines what relations must obtain between the inhabitants of the EU as agents or as natural persons, if these interpersonal relationships are to be adequate for political agency and thus, indirectly, for citizenship. It begins by arguing that the two orders of experience – social and cultural coordinates on the one hand, and the...

In Chapter 5, I argued that political agency was inherently collective. Agency’s being political at all presupposes social interaction. For reasons of both practicability and normative satisfactoriness, decision-making on matters of public interest needs to take place between agents in concert. Chapter 9 treated relations between individuals simpliciter; this considers relations between pre-constituted groups. Political agency involves the formation of collective political subjects mobilised around the pursuit of collective substantive purposes. Substantive purposes embody values, and, just as individual agents hold and pursue differing values, so too do the collective political subjects they compose. If agency is, as I have...