Recognition of the legal status of the individual under Community law did not originally differ from the equivalent legal status under international law. For half a century, however, the idea of European citizenship has been gaining ground.
The idea of citizenship of the European Union (EU) was born as a reaction to the absence of a European identity, following a line of reasoning that linked further integration to greater involvement of the citizens of member states in the life of the Union. Like the latter, however, European citizenship was, from the outset, driven by antithetical aims. In order topostpone until the Greek calends the thorny issues linked to the distribution - between member states and European institutions - ofthe competence to determine the criteria for acquiring and losing European citizenship status, the easy solution was to give European citizenship a derivative character. A person acquires EU citizenship through another status: that of a national of a Member State for the purposes ofapplying the Treaties. Member States are not, however, entirely autonomous in exercising their competence to decide who has access to this status, as demonstrated by the limit set by protection against the risk of statelessness in international law. From the "sale" of EU citizenship to the cases concerning citizenship following Brexit, the derivative nature of EU citizenship demonstrates that this status is at an imbalance. Exposing this imbalance will be the first objective of this conference.
Its second objective will be to question the nature of the object. European citizenship is in fact a particular form of status civitatis that differs from its ordinary legal form, a form we are accustomed to regarding as equivalent to nationality. Yet its very principle distinguishes it: the various legal positions associated with Union citizenship are based on the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of nationality, whereas differential treatment on grounds of nationality is an essential feature of the international order. Although the introduction of the principle of nationality into international law came late, the practice of citizenship has come to be understood in terms of nationality, with significant difficulties in colonial contexts, which presuppose the justification of differential treatment. The very principle of Union citizenship is therefore atypical.
Does this mean that this sui generis status is not a true citizenship? And how can we tell? The final objective of this conference will be to establish a method for answering these questions. Until now, the dominant theory of citizenship among jurists has approachedthisstatus as capable of being filled withall kinds of content. The aim here is to propose a different theory. The conference will aim to show that the fact that citizenship varies from one legal system to another does not prevent us from studying this same variation, nor from assessingthe coherence of a change in legal practice with regard to citizenship with the constitutional framework in which it is inscribed. In this way, we hope to offer an overview of European citizenship and some working tools to open up new perspectives on this fundamental and often still poorly understood status.
