The EU often refers to supposedly common European democratic and constitutional values when seeking to legitimize itself. A notable example of this tendency was the introduction of the status of EU citizenship for all member state nationals in the Treaty of Maastricht. Lineages of European Citizenship investigates how far citizenship can be treated as a shared European value and the degree to which EU citizenship draws on or departs from the national traditions of the member states. A distinguished team of international scholars offer a theoretical, comparative and historical analysis of the development of citizenship from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in nine European countries, the USA and the EU. They argue that although there are certain common features of modern citizenship, they have evolved in very different ways. As a result, there is no common pattern. Moreover, in certain crucial respects, the EU departs from the nation state model. This book explores the social, political and ideological factors that have conditioned these differences.
The authors argue that citizenship must always be contextualized within the struggles of citizens and the relations between state and society that obtain at a particular and in a given country.