JJUA55299U Cancelled ”Citizenship Matters”: membership(s), models, functions and tranformations of citizenship in the EU context

Does “citizenship matter”? And why? Is nationality and citizenship the same thing? What defines a citizen? And why is obtaining citizenship in certain countries easier than in others? Who can become an EU citizen? Are all passports equal? How do citizenship and policymaking work together on individual, group, and collective claims?

We explore these and many other citizenship matters.  

Citizenship defines “who we are” in the eyes of the state (demos) from a legal, political and social perspective and by juxtaposition to the “Other(s)” (nationality/identity/belonging). Citizenship matters are interlinked to several legal and political categories vital to public constitutional law, EU and international law, immigration law, and integration policies. Citizenship is also a key legal-political tool for understanding and interpreting legal reservations, analysing legal-political-historical contexts, assessing binding institutional concepts (i.e., democracy, sovereignty, constitutional values and principles), making causal connections on the determination of (individual/collective) rights of groups (i.e., gender), and also understanding agreement’s conditionalities on national-EU-international levels. Citizenship matters extend further to the EU integration project through the EU citizenship status and relate to ongoing post-modern crises and phenomena (digitalisation, migration, populism, the pandemic, economic crises, Brexit).

Knowledge of citizenship opens job opportunities in the legal profession, the public sector, rights advocacy, and other policy-impact processes, as well as in the private sector. More specifically, the curriculum-portfolio of a number of legal professions require or privilege knowledge of citizenship matters: the practitioner of the public-constitutional law (lawyer, judge, legal assistant, legal consultant), the private law, and private international law legal consultant, the government-expert consultant (citizenship experts, policy makers on migration, minority and special group’s rights, non-citizen rights, integration and inclusion-exclusion criteria on welfare benefits etc.), but also the Diplomatic corps and Embassy assistants, the public administrative employee or advisor on relevant fields (i.e. Udlændingestyrelsen and citizenship-migration relevant authorities and public services), the International Organisations or NGO collaborator-expert (i.e., the Danish Institute for Human Rights) and active citizenship campaigning groups (supporting global causes, such as tackling world poverty, equality, solidarity, social cohesion, institutional legitimacy matters, adequate access to justice and to welfare benefits, or promoting ecological consciousness, combating neighborhood crime, preserving or expanding the national identity, dealing with inclusion/exclusion of third country nationals etc.). Last but not least, citizenship is a field rich in challenges for the legal scholar: because of citizenship’s multipurpose functions and roles within the democratic systems, interest in citizenship matters and citizenship transformations is growing, as several funded studies-projects evidence.

The course structure provides four (4) consequential Learning Modules, built to a step-by-step, progressively deepening understanding of citizenship matters and beyond, conveyed through legal reasoning assessments and discussion. More specifically:

Learning Module 1. Foundations of Citizenship

-1.a The "status civitatis"

-1.b Access to citizenship

-1.c Loss of citizenship 

-1.d The "domaine réservé" of the citizen: rights, duties, obligations.

Learning Module 2. From Vikings to contemporary Danes

-2.a The Danish citizenship. 

-2.b The Nordic Citizenship.

Learning Module 3. Supranational citizenship

-3.a EU citizenship

-3.b Contemporary challenges to EU citizenship (BREXIT; immigration-refugee crisis and statelessness; pandemic crisis and the limitation of the right of movement)

Learning Module 4. Post-national models of citizenship. Critical approaches to the transformations of citizenship

4. a The "digital citizenship" and the Jus Digitalis

4. b The "investment citizenship" and the Jus Pecuniae

4. c The "green" citizenship: perspectives and challenges

4. d The "populist citizen".