Doing European Citizenship: from policy to everyday practices

Orientação: Licínia Simão e Irina Velicu

Programa de Doutoramento: International Politics and Conflict Resolution

What European citizenship is and how it is done is contingent on the everyday realities of the 510 million European citizens of the European Union (EU). They all enjoy same rights, being considered, from a policy and institutional perspective, as a unitary and homogeneous political category (EU, 2007; Guild, 2010; Militaru, 2011). However, everyday citizenship practices of various communities, some peripheral to the EU policy making centres, show that there is significant heterogeneity in how European citizenship can be done (Furlong & Guidikova, 2001; Aradau et al., 2010; van Zoonen et al., 2010; Mascheroni, 2013). This project draws theoretically on 'plural performativity theories' (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013), from a Critical International Relations Theory perspective. Critical theory's main concern with exclusion and emancipation is here read along two axes. Namely from a material or redistribution perspective, related to the equity/ unfairness of production relations (Fraser, 1995; Cox, 2001). The second, of Habermasian inspiration, focuses on the recognition and communicative (Fraser, 1995) aspects, linking political community building with inclusive dialogue (Linklater, 2007). Empirically the research deals with European ecovillages as case studies. It examines the relation between the normativity of a unitary supra-national citizenship and the heterogeneity of everyday citizenship practices. This allows to explore possibilities for emancipatory transformations of European citizenship and a more inclusive, plural, relational meaning of the political constructed from the bottom up.