EU Citizenship and Religious Liberty in an Enlarged Europe

Published date01 July 2010
Date01 July 2010
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2010.00516.x
eulj_516417..438
EU Citizenship and Religious Liberty in an
Enlarged Europe
Sonia Morano-Foadi*
Abstract: This article intends to contribute to the theoretical debate on how EU citizen-
ship could be regarded as a bundle of common European individual rights (and, to a lesser
extent, obligations) and part of a democratic polity in which every citizen counts equally
irrespectively of his/her religious belonging and faith.
The EU perceives itself as a community based on shared values. Since there is no
European people, nor a European polity, common values play a core role in European
polity building. The question, however, is whether common values can be experienced by
the EU citizens in daily life and to what extent there are common values in the EU
Member States. These issues are explored using the non-discrimination principle on
grounds of religion, as a litmus-test for the existence of common values within Europe.
I Introduction
This article, which discusses the challenges offered by an increasingly multicultural
society at this stage of European integration, f‌inds its inspiration in the theoretical
construction of EU citizenship based on the ‘common values’ of the peoples of Europe.
Central to the European integration process is the fundamental rights discourse to
which the EU citizenship concept has contributed. One of the major challenges of
integration is to build a European identity based on a sense of common destiny and
belonging.1
According to a well-accepted view, European integration has led to a multi-tiered
form of governance, which involves different levels: the local, the regional, the state
and the European.2Consequently, a notion of EU social citizenship nested in this
* Senior Lecturer in European Law, Oxford Brookes University. This article is based on a paper prepared
for the Conference on European Law & Policy in Context entitled ‘The Next 50 Years: The Future of
European Law & Policy’, Birmingham, 3–4 July 2008. The author wishes to thank Professor Lucy
Vickers, Dr Nazila Ghanea-Hercock and Dr Micaela Malena for their useful comments on earlier
versions of this article.
1J.H.H. Weiler, U. Haltern and F. Mayer, ‘European Democracy and Its Critique: Five Uneasy Pieces’,
(1995) Jean Monnet Paper, available at http://www.jeanmonnetprogram.org.
2T. Faist, ‘Social Citizenship in the EU: Nested Membership’, (2001) 39(1) Journal of Common Market
Studies 40; E. Meehan, Citizenship and the European Community (Sage, 1993); D. Kostakopoulou,
‘Nested “Old” and “New” Citizenships in the EU: Bringing Forth the Complexity’, (2000) 5(3) Columbia
Journal of European Law 389; G. de Búrca and B. de Witte, Social Rights in Europe (Oxford University
Press, 2005).
European Law Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, July 2010, pp. 417–438.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
multi-tiered membership system has been elaborated.3The implication of this is that
there is a mixture of rights guaranteed by regional, state, interstate and EU levels.
Critics advanced in relation to the multi-tiered form of governance suggest that this
form of governance has fragmented the citizenship project which in turn has lost its
power of integration.4However, it has been argued that Europeanisation has not
proceeded rigidly in layered terms, but it has introduced signif‌icant change on the
national level, and consequently regional and local levels, so that ‘the solution cannot
be found on either the national or the European levels in isolation from each other’.5
This is possible as the EU as a community of communities is sustained by
the Member States’ intention to engage in the integration project and accept EU
sovereignty.6
The EU perceives itself not only as a common market, but as a community of
principles and values that stems from a common history and identity.7However, the
identif‌ication of Member State nationals with the EU is fulf‌illed through the EU
citizenship project and within its scope.8
The substance of membership is in a commitment to the ‘shared values’ of the EU as
expressed in its constituent documents. Thus, the law assists in creating a European
identity based on shared values and norms9‘by declaring common principles and rights
in the hope that these will inf‌luence the legal systems of the Member States as an
integrating force’.10 This is stressed by Article 1 of the Consolidated Version of the
Treaty on European Union, incorporating Lisbon Treaty changes (hereafter LTEU)
(ex Article 1 EU) which states that the European polity remains committed to realise
the objective of the EU ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. The
European citizenship concept redef‌ines a polity in which the ‘us’ may no longer be
Germans or Italians but would become European and the ‘them’ non-European. The
treaties would have to be seen not only as an agreement among states, but as a social
contract among the nationals of those states.11
It is the status as a citizen of a polity that ref‌lects the authentic and genuine relation
to a community necessary for increased self-identif‌ication with, and acceptance of, any
polity.
There are two dominant visions of the EU as a political community. The f‌irst is based
on the idea that the EU is a right-based entity and the second considers the EU as a
political community instrumental to the eff‌iciency model conception.12
3Faist, op cit n2supra,at37.
4G. Delanty, ‘European Citizenship: A Critical Assessment’, (2007) 11(1) Citizenship Studies 70.
5Delanty, ibid,at70.
6D. Kostakopoulou, ‘Towards a Theory of Constructive Citizenship in Europe’, (1996) 4(4) Journal of
Political Philosophy 337.
7M. Zemni, ‘Islam, European identity and the limits of multiculturalism’, in W. Shadid and
P.S. Van Koningsveld (eds), Religious freedom and the Neutrality of the State. The position of Islam in the
EU (Peeters, 2002), 158.
8D. Kostakopoulou, ‘EU Citizenship: Writing the Future’, (2007) 12(5) European Law Journal 628.
9L. Senden, ‘Conceptual Convergence and Judicial cooperation in Sex Equality Law’, in S. Prechal and
B. Van Roermund, The Coherence of EU Law, The Search for Unity in Divergent Concepts (Oxford
University Press, 2008), 365
10 G. de Búrca, ‘The Language of Rights and European integration’, in J. Shaw and G. Moore (eds), New
Legal Dynamics of EU (Clarendon Press, 1995), 48–49.
11 J.H.H. Weiler, U. Halter and F. Mayer, ‘European Democracy and Its Critique’ (1995) 18 West European
Politics 5.
12 Delanty, op cit n4supra,at70.
European Law Journal Volume 16
418 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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