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European Citizenship

Decent Essays

1. Summary
There have been a lot of contributions by scholars to the widely discussed topic of European citizenship. In his article Espen D.H. Olsen argues in contrast to many others, “that the Maastricht Treaty was not year zero in the EU citizenship discourse” (Olsen 2008, p. 40). His study deals with the time before the general discussion over the European citizenship started in the 1970s (cf. ibid, p. 41ff.) The article’s main finding states that European citizenship has been in existence from the European integration’s starting point, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Olsen defines his concept of citizenship “as a status of individuals in relation to a political unit” (ibid, p. 41) which he divides in the four dimensions …show more content…

53). That is clearly contradicting to his own finding before and generally seems to be too big of a stretching of his concept. He merely speculates about the status of membership in that case. It can also be argued that the coal and steel workers were of course included in the wording of the contract, because it was their industries that were being integrated. But an equivalence of the coal and steel workers to European Citizens on such thin arguments is rather far fetched.
Secondly, during applying the membership dimension on the Rome Treaties, Olsen again confuses workers and producers as members or citizens, although he himself, as before, states that “the prevailing image is one of a focus on individuals as workers and producers” (ibid, p. 47). So by wrongly applying the membership dimension, Olsen again disproves his own argument.
Thirdly, Olsen analyses preambles of the aforementioned treaties and documents on several occasions. Unfortunately he only derives speculations and conjectures out them. E.g. the preamble of the free movement Regulation 1612/68 states that the “freedom of movement constitutes a fundamental right of workers and their families” as well as it gives a guarantee for “the possibility of improving [the worker’s] living and working conditions and promoting his social advancement” (ibid, p. 50). The author immediately jumps to the conclusion that this is somehow a kind of membership that even relates

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