Co-Creating European Union Citizenship: Institutional Process and Crescive Norms

Theodora Kostakopoulou 

University of Warwick - School of Law
August 27, 2013

Forthcoming in the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, Vol. 15, 2014
Warwick School of Law Research Paper No. 2013-24 
Abstract:      
By focusing on processual perspective and institutional change, EU citizenship emerges as a co-created institution. It is the product of institutional design and co-creation by actors at all levels of governance and is shaped by multilogues at the ‘top’, ‘bottom’ and ‘sideways’ as well as by citizens’ formal and informal actions. A co-creation perspective leads us to reconsider state-centered assumptions about which form of citizenship should be predominant and the dualism of centralism (supra-nationalism) versus ‘home-rule’ (inter-governmentalism) and to embrace a genuinely citizen-centered perspective. The article develops the co-creation paradigm, examines its dimensions, various forms and patterns and, by discussing the post-Rottmann and Zambrano case law (McCarthy, Dereci, Iida, O., S. and L. and Ymeraga) as well as Tsakouridis and P.I., sheds light onto the complex dynamics that make EU citizenship a vehicle of transformative institutional change but can also work against it.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 37

Keywords: European Union citizenship, institutional change, co-creation of realities, Court of Justice of the EU, judicial activism, citizenship rights, Rottmann, Zambrano, McCarthy, Dereci, Iida, O., S. and L. and Ymeraga, Tsakouridis, P.I.

Full text available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2316839