Citizens of the European Union. Status, Identity and Beyond

On November 1, 2023, it was three decades since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty that established the European Union. The project of founding this organisation was widely debated in previous decades. After the Paris Summit of 1974, the prospect of such an organisation seemed closer to completion but still too timidly assumed by the European leaders to materialise. An important step was achieved in 1979 when the first direct vote for the European Parliament took place. That can be considered the first concrete gesture in the sense of the democratisation of European construction. Beyond the entire institutional architecture and the clarification of the community decision-making mechanism, the Treaty of Maastricht introduced the citizenship of the European Union. This volume has two parts. The first part includes studies on the concept of EU citizenship, how it is defined in the process of accession to the European Union, the financial support offered to promote EU citizenship, the perspectives of digital citizenship and how the Union must be prepared to respond to people's expectations, how the flow of people from third countries and naturalising in EU member states affects the substance of European citizenship. The second part presents case studies that reveal how EU citizenship is instrumentalised and how this process can be responded to. The message sent by the opinion polls published annually by Standard Eurobarometer is that European citizens are still not completely aware of their status in the European Union. For this reason, many rights provided by the Treaties are not yet fully exercised. The context of the elections for the European Parliament in 2024 can provide a platform for profound debate about the role that citizens will choose to make the EU Citizenship status a fundamental element of identity for the European construction to go beyond the appearances of a political and economic union.