Civil, Political and Social Citizenship Rights

T.H. Marshall (Reference Marshall1950) supplied a taxonomy that we, like many students of citizenship, can adopt (Bulmer and Rees Reference Bulmer and Rees1996; Ferrera Reference Ferrera2005; Isin and Turner Reference Isin and Turner2007; Lister Reference Lister2005) without necessarily adopting his historical sequencing (Breiner Reference Breiner2006) or empirical claims about their accuracy in the context of the UK (Powell Reference Powell2002, Reference Powell2009). Marshall divided citizenship into three kinds of rights:

• ● Civil citizenship rights are rights to personal liberty: rights to free speech, mobility, free association, fair trials and in general freedom from governmental restrictions on activity. Civil citizenship rights are both crucial to any minimal definition of democracy and freedom, and somewhat limited as they do not redress limitations on action that come from social and economic inequality. All they do is give citizens rights to actions untrammelled by the state.

• ● Political citizenship rights are rights to ‘participate in the exercise of power’. Above all, this means the vote, but it also means associated rights to engage in political action – the rights to run for office, to petition government, to form political associations. They are the rights that make a liberal democracy democratic.

• ● Social citizenship rights, finally, are rights to equal access to certain aspects of life: equal access to key goods such as health, housing, a minimum income, legal representation before the courts, or education.

Marshall was careful to note the boundaries and function of citizenship rights. Rather than writing a charter for decommodified egalitarianism in all aspects of life, as he is sometimes misread to have done, he was writing a charter for a kind of moderate social, liberal, democracy (Greer and Mätzke Reference Greer and Mätzke2009; Wincott Reference Wincott2009). Citizenship rights were to be islands of equality in a sea of inequality, giving all citizens the dignity and wherewithal to participate fully in society. By creating some equality, they would head off the tensions and indignities of an entirely equal or a markedly unequal society. In his English context, such rights would compensate for the inequalities of capitalism. In a European context, they might also compensate for the inherited inequalities between and within member states. He was uninterested in corporatism and organized businesses or unions as a specific area of policy and politics; his approach did not fit well with rights that were not fundamentally defined vis-à-vis the state.

Nor did Marshall talk about the status of foreigners. In his text, the status of citizenship – the right to have rights – was not an issue and he did not discuss the different and often more troubling situation of immigrants, refugees and third-country nationals that has justly received much attention since (Hansen and Hager Reference Hansen and Hager2012). In general, Marshall’s vagueness about the extent of the citizenry (England? the UK?) prefigured the problems faced by any effort to understand the effects of multiple citizenships and multilevel governance for his citizenship rights (Crowley Reference Crowley1998).

European Citizenship Rights

The EU is an uncommonly successful machine for the simultaneous production of supranational integration and transnational civil citizenship rights. The fundamental citizenship rights of the EU treaties are civil rights: freedom to move around, to be treated without discrimination based on member state of origin, freedom to establish oneself or a business in another country and freedom from certain other forms of discrimination on grounds such as gender or age. This has meant individual rights to cross-border mobility as well as a programme of deregulation and re-regulation that has substantially expanded the freedoms of businesses to operate across borders. The financial crisis has produced a few policies that actually further civil citizenship rights as a byproduct of liberalizing markets and producing competition, such as the Single Market Act, though there has recently been a backlash in some countries against perceived ‘benefit tourism’ from poorer EU member states. This backlash has yet to produce policies at the EU level that weaken the civil right of freedom to move, though it has led public and private actors to discriminatory actions that affect both citizens and non-citizen migrants. Member states (most prominently the UK and Germany) have reduced the generosity of welfare programmes used by non-national EU citizens (BBC News 2014a, b).

European social citizenship was always weaker. For decades, it was relatively easy to characterize EU social policy. It grew from treaty bases that were designed to promote the four freedoms rather than equality or solidarity, and its accomplishments frequently depended on internal market regulation (as with labour law) or social security coordination policies. Various formulations of a ‘European Social Model’ tended to mix characterizations of member state social models, ideal types and EU statements supporting some member states’ social priorities (Adnett and Hardy Reference Adnett and Hardy2005; Clift Reference Clift2007; Giddens et al. Reference Giddens, Diamond and Little2006; Goetschy Reference Goetschy2006; Hemerijck Reference Hemerijck2011). Many of them were as decidedly normative as the definitions of European citizenship that also blossomed in the last decade, or, if critical, were critical of the gap between normative claims and reality. Looking at what passed for European social citizenship, it actually tended to be extensions of civil citizenship – essentially, extending the four freedoms so that citizens of one EU member state could enjoy the welfare states of another (Caporaso and Tarrow Reference Caporaso and Tarrow2009). Efforts to develop a deeper European social model, or citizenship, were always ambiguous and never as fixed as normatively tinged theories would suggest (already clear in Wincott Reference Wincott2003; for evidence, Alber Reference Alber2006; Clift Reference Clift2007; Draxler and Van Vliet Reference Draxler and Van Vliet2010).

European political citizenship, compared with the hard-won democratic victories in the member states, can seem rather thin (Bellamy Reference Bellamy2012). This was in large part because the member states are powerful in the EU. Ultimately many of the most powerful EU actors are governments, and elections to the member state governments the key opportunity to participate in political power. EU citizenship depends on member state citizenship, in legal terms as well as perceptions of legitimacy (Bellamy Reference Bellamy2008). The specific political citizenship of EU citizens then amounts to whatever they enjoy by virtue of citizenship in a member state plus the rights to vote in local and EU elections wherever in the EU they may live. It was, like the EU’s explicit social rights, built on legal non-discrimination and is essentially an extension of the civil citizenship right to move around.

The three kinds of citizenship rights, then, have very different standings in the EU. Civil rights to move around freely form the roots of the other EU rights. EU social citizenship rights mostly mean the right to access the welfare state in another country, and political citizenship rights mostly mean the right to move elsewhere and influence local and EU politics.

Fritz Scharpf defined this difference as the ‘constitutional asymmetry’ of the EU (Scharpf Reference Scharpf2002) in an argument that others have expanded (de la Porte and Heins Reference de la Porte and Heins2014; Martinsen and Vollaard Reference Martinsen and Vollaard2014). Asymmetry has produced a theme in research on EU citizenship, which is that the actions of the EU might endanger social citizenship by endangering member states’ ability to actually raise and spend the money necessary to make social citizenship rights effective (Greer Reference Greer2009; Newdick Reference Newdick2009). The EU regulatory state does not spend much, and few or no social rights (housing, health, education, pensions, etc.) are meaningful without massive expenditures. Caporaso and Tarrow (Reference Caporaso and Tarrow2009), in celebrating freedom to access health care in another member state, downplay the fact that such freedom depends on the member states’ organizing and financing health care systems. The EU does not have the money or mandate to organize or finance any meaningful health care with its budget, and member states seem to have little appetite for a more redistributive EU. If EU law constrains welfare states in ways that make them less viable (Ferrera Reference Ferrera2005), then it cannot be said to have helped social citizenship. If it constrains states in their welfare decisions, it is constraining political citizenship. Traditionally the most important EU constraints on member states were in the name of the four freedoms, which often expanded civil citizenship, but fiscal governance changes since 2010 constrain political and social citizenship of member states by constraining member states.

Economic Adjustment Programmes: The Troika

The Troika is an increasingly formal way to take EU member states into effective receivership, subjecting almost every aspect of their governance to oversight by EU and international institutions. In substance, its policies have tended to erode social citizenship rights, and the process of receivership embodied in the Troika damages political citizenship. The Troika was formally renamed ‘the three institutions’ early in 2015 in response to challenges from the new Greek government, but the change did not catch on and the new name was not enough to mollify Greece (Koutantou and Tagaris Reference Koutantou and Tagaris2015). The Troika is composed of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank and the European Commission (on behalf of the European Financial Stability Fund and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism and, as of September 2012, the European Financial Stability Mechanism).

The Troika is essentially a conditional lender, making public sector loans in return for government compliance with a number of more or less binding fiscal and policy conditions. These conditions are published as Economic Adjustment Programmes, also known as Memoranda of Understanding (MOU). A crisis measure, Economic Adjustment Programmes initially had no clear legal basis. Later, ‘two-pack’ legislation (see below) and a 2013 treaty amendment to Article 136, creating the European Stability Mechanism, brought into being a permanent rescue fund and legal basis for current and future Economic Adjustment Programmes that the Court of Justice of the European Union endorsed in the 2012 Pringle decision (case C-370/12). Economic Adjustment Programme conditionality is tough, but it is worth noting that it comes with support far beyond what indebted countries in the rest of the world could receive. The two Greek bailouts total about €190bn, for a country with a GDP of just under €300bn per year. As of July 2015, the Greeks and institutions are discussing a further loan of about €86bn. Non-eurozone states such as Latvia and Hungary had International Monetary Fund stabilization programmes substantially co-financed by EU institutions, but they were not formally engaged with the Troika.

The Economic Adjustment Programmes are intended to change the trajectories of countries in deep trouble, some of which had clear structural problems even before the boom that burst in 2008 (Greer Reference Greer2014). They combine cuts and tax increases, pro-‘competitiveness’ policies such as labour law deregulation, and smaller-scale policy initiatives such as calls for opening up transport markets, liberalizing professional regulation, administrative changes and privatization of remaining state service providers. There are only a few exceptions to the general message of retrenchment and limited public liabilities.

We can examine the effects of the Economic Adjustment Programmes on citizens of the five states in two ways. First, we can examine the very fact of the programmes’ existence, which has consequences for political citizenship in the affected countries. An Economic Adjustment Programme means that details of policy, consequential ones such as retirement ages, pension levels, privatizations and labour laws, are being rewritten at the behest of the Troika. By design, none of the Troika members affords citizens of any country much opportunity to participate in the exercise of its power. This means that transferring power over the government of Cyprus to the Troika, for example, involves a reduction in the political citizenship rights of the Cypriots.

The consequences of the Economic Adjustment Programmes for political citizenship flow logically from a comparison of the Troika’s composition with that of a member state government. Two of the three institutions in the Troika are essentially ‘non-majoritarian’ in that citizens are firmly distanced from participation in determining their actions. The European Central Bank is effectively governed by central banks of the eurozone, whose governors can be elected to its board. Its autonomy is entrenched in the EU treaties, along with a commitment to price stability as an overriding goal. The International Monetary Fund is governed by its members in accordance with their contributions (quotas), which are fixed in proportions that give big EU member states a significant role and the US an automatic veto. The European Commission is the most democratic of the three in that EU citizens can affect its composition through votes for the European Parliament and for the governments who nominate commissioners and interact with it in the Council. The Troika is not transparent; we do not know how the International Monetary Fund, European Commission, and European Central Bank interact or what exactly is the role of the informal finance ministers gathering in the Eurogroup. Nonetheless, the three institutions all reduce the role of any given member state’s citizens’ participation in the meaningful exercise of power; the citizens best positioned to influence the International Monetary Fund through their choice of government are in the US. It would be possible to argue that the Troika addresses an imbalance in which voters in Greece or other states could ignore the preferences and interests of other member states’ voters, but it is hard to argue that the way to redress such an imbalance is through the empowerment of the Commission, the International Monetary Fund and a central bank.

Then we can examine the contents of the Economic Adjustment Programmes for their effect on social citizenship. In the welfare state itself, the biggest and most reliable policy outcomes are a reduction in social welfare expenditure and some tinkering, especially with health care systems. Nobody would have picked out the health care systems of Greece, Ireland, Portugal or Cyprus as effective equalizers before the crisis (Toth Reference Toth2010), but the scale of the reduction of health care expenditure is dramatic in each (Burke et al. Reference Burke, Thomas, Barry and Keegan2014; Legido-Quigley et al. Reference Legido-Quigley, Urdaneta, Gonzalez, La Parra, Muntaner, Alvarez-Dardet, Martin-Moreno and McKee2013; Maresso et al. Reference Maresso, Mladovsky, Thomson, Sagan, Karanikolos, Richardson, Cylus, Evetovits, Jowett, Figueras and Kluge2015). The effects on access to the welfare state are also dramatic. For example, Greek social insurance eligibility is tied to recent or current employment, so its startling rates of long-term unemployment translate into denial of health care and social care benefits (Kentikelenis Reference Kentikelenis2015). It is reflected in increasing rates of communicable diseases such as AIDS in the wake of cuts in drug treatment programmes and the reappearance of malaria in Greece in the aftermath of cuts to mosquito abatement programmes (Kentikelenis et al. Reference Kentikelenis, Karanikolos, Reeves, McKee and Stuckler2014). More generally, there has been a sharp rise in reported unmet health needs across the countries in receivership (Reeves et al. Reference Reeves, McKee and Stuckler2015). The country with the most severe debt burden, worst economic decline and most corrupt health system, Greece (Matsaganis Reference Matsaganis2011), has perhaps unsurprisingly seen the most serious deterioration of health care access and health outcomes (Kentikelenis et al. Reference Kentikelenis, Karanikolos, Reeves, McKee and Stuckler2014).

The Troika operated initially in parallel to conventional EU law. The body of civil citizenship rights enshrined in EU law remained intact, but the crisis conditions in the Economic Adjustment Programme states cast a new light on EU civil citizenship rights. On one hand, freedom of movement gave citizens of those states the option to migrate elsewhere in the EU. On the other hand, the crisis coincided with increased flows of refugees from outside the EU who disproportionately landed first in Greece and Italy. Under the Schengen Agreement they have no right to cross borders from the state that hosts them. Under the currently very contentious Dublin Regulation, the first member state they enter has the responsibility for them and they can be returned to, or blocked from leaving, that member state (Azoulai and de Vries Reference Azoulai and de Vries2014). The result was a rolling crisis for most of 2015 as different countries took very different approaches to refugees. There is also considerable potential for spillover from restrictive policies aimed at non-citizens (for example, effects on citizens, such as ethnic and racial minorities, who are caught up by policies aimed at non-citizens). A politics of zero-sum ethnic conflict can damage the rights of citizens as well as non-citizens.

The European Central Bank as a Judge of Governments

The participation of the European Central Bank in the Troika is a sign of its dramatic, and generally unanticipated, role in shaping the political future of Europe. Citizens of any member state play only a tiny role in the exercise of its power, but its power over member state policies and governments has increased dramatically with the crisis.

The European Central Bank has given itself a dual mandate: price stability and microeconomic policy reform (the latter is nowhere in the treaties). The actions are the purchase of debt – of governments, of banks – and statements implying that such a thing will happen. The most important was probably the European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s announcement that the bank would do ‘whatever it takes’ to preserve the euro (Carrel et al. Reference Carrel, Barkin and Breidthardt2012). His key instrument at the time was the ‘Outright Monetary Transactions’ programme that Draghi announced on 6 September 2012, which would involve buying government debt subject to government compliance with conditionalities set by the rest of the EU, presumably including compliance with recommendations from the European Semester. This is an ambiguous goal for any country, especially one not subject to the explicit conditionalities of an Economic Adjustment Programme, supported by a programme that was never needed (Draghi apparently influenced markets without its actual implementation) and is not clearly legal, and a programme that is formally unrelated (the Emergency Liquidity Assistance, ELA, for private banks). It would appear that countries are eligible to have the European Central Bank support their and their banks’ debt based on their compliance with the European Central Bank’s interpretation of compliance with other EU policy reform initiatives.

Participation in the Troika means that the European Central Bank is participating in conditional lending and endorsing a detailed public policy agenda. Beyond that, the bank also has a record of influencing basic member state politics. It is hard to say if the European Central Bank helped to force Silvio Berlusconi out of office as Italian prime minister, but it seems quite likely that it did by declining to purchase Italian government bonds until Berlusconi left (Hopkin Reference Hopkin2012; Jones Reference Jones2012). The European Central Bank also sent a secret letter to Italy in August 2011 calling for detailed policy changes, such as professional services liberalization and firm-level wage bargaining.Footnote ¹ There is no mandate for such an action, but it could only have coercive force, coming from the central bank on which the Italian government’s continuing funding depended.

Likewise, the European Central Bank contributed to the effective defeat of Greece’s challenge to the Troika in May–June 2010 when it declined to provide additional Emergency Liquidity Assistance to keep Greece’s private sector banks functioning in the face of a bank run. Its member Bank of Greece (2015) issued an alarming report warning that failure to reach any agreement with the EU ‘would snowball into an uncontrollable crisis’. The European Central Bank decision would have made it impossible for Greek banks to survive a bank run that the Bank of Greece loudly predicted. It forced a crisis in Greece that ended negotiations, even after the referendum on the agreement, with Greek defeat and a threat to the governing Syriza party’s basic electoral and parliamentary stability.

This is far from the world of apolitical guardians that mainstream economists like to imagine when they justify power for central banks (Adolph Reference Adolph2013). A central bank manipulating market expectations and private funding lines to change a prime minster, rewrite labour law or reverse a referendum result is hardly called for in the treaties or in the theory of central banking. Regardless of one’s sympathy for European Central Bank policymakers, and it is possible to argue that their decisions were forced on them, they have not played a positive role for democratic political citizenship. If an organization as distant from citizens as the European Central Bank starts making decisions about economic priorities, regulatory and public policy, and the composition of governments, then we see a net deprivation of political citizenship rights.

As for social citizenship rights, it is hard to argue that cuts in social services, reduction of access, imposition of co-payments and other cost-cutting techniques endorsed by the European Central Bank in its letters or Troika participation improve social services. Each cut reduces their ability to be an equalizing force in society. Even in the systems where there was considerable scope to improve the equalizing effects of welfare states as they actually worked, it is not guaranteed that double-digit cuts, regularly repeated, will produce the kind of improved management that would provide more egalitarian outcomes.

New Fiscal Governance

The actions of the Troika and European Central Bank come with a permanent counterpoint: major legal and institutional changes whose effect is to reduce the involvement of citizens in the exercise of political power, with the goal of limiting the ability of governments to pursue policies that might, among other things, extend or preserve social citizenship.

The Troika was quickly and explicitly created as an emergency measure to cope with financial crises in a few countries. The European Central Bank’s dramatic role, which very much affects eurozone states, was never apparently intended, and it is not clear the European Central Bank’s leaders have wanted it. The intended, permanent, solution to the troubles of the eurozone is a substantially more forceful and intrusive fiscal governance system for all member states. The diagnosis was that the crisis happened because of government profligacy and soft budget constraints. The logic, in general and for German voters (Bastasin Reference Bastasin2015), was that the eurozone could bail out profligate countries only if the rules were hardened so that they would never again be able to run harmful deficits (Greer Reference Greer2014). This logic entailed ‘fiscal governance’: setting European-level binding rules on fiscal policy with automatic enforcement, entrenched in treaties, with a minimum of discretion for Commission and Council. In other words, it involved subjecting essentially all policy-making to strict rules that constrain the autonomy and power of member states. This is a dramatic shift in the political citizenship of EU citizens, made in pursuit of a policy goal with consequences for their social citizenship.

The centre of EU fiscal governance is the Stability and Growth Pact, which was introduced alongside monetary union in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty on European Union and which constrained all EU member states to maximum 3 per cent deficits and 60 per cent debt-to-GDP ratios. The Stability and Growth Pact was formally hard law, but it was substantially softened in 2005 when the Commission deemed Germany and France non-compliant, and it obviously failed to protect the eurozone against the financial and debt crises (Schelkle Reference Schelkle2009).

In 2010 came an effort to build a tougher and more capable Stability and Growth Pact through a complex mixture of new legislation (the ‘six-pack’ and ‘two-pack’), a new intergovernmental treaty (the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, TSCG), and a procedure for surveillance of member state policies (the European Semester) (see Figure 1). It created both hard budgetary constraints (the ‘corrective’ arm) and a surveillance system to prevent future Stability and Growth Pact violations or macroeconomic imbalances (the ‘preventative’ arm).

The corrective arm is a strengthening of the Stability and Growth Pact. Member states which are violating the Stability and Growth Pact’s deficit or debt rules can be placed in an Excessive Deficit Procedure, which, after a number of years, leads to obligatory fines. The reformed corrective arm formally removes discretion from the Commission, which is now obliged to report Stability and Growth Pact violations, and from the Council, which in fiscal governance will now use a new voting rule. The new voting rule, reverse qualified majority, requires a qualified majority to block the implementation of punishment under the Stability and Growth Pact. In theory, the new fiscal governance of the EU is hard law that tasks member states with supplying quality information, tasks the Commission with identifying non-compliant budgets, economies and policies, and limits the Council’s ability to amend decisions or punishments (Greer et al. Reference Greer, Fahy, Elliott, Wismar, Jarman and Palm2014). In practice, much of the work is done by the ‘eurogroup’ of eurozone finance ministers. The eurogroup might seem to be a formal part of EU governance but it is an informal gathering of eurozone finance ministers, which is how it could decide to exclude a eurozone finance minister in 2015 (Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis).

If the corrective arm is theoretically automatic, punitive and focused on overall finances, the preventative arm involves more detailed engagement in member state policies and priorities such as the appropriate entitlements and expenditures for health, pensions, education and employment. The preventative arm of the Stability and Growth Pact is most visible in the Semester. Essentially, the Semester is a form of surveillance in which EU member states iteratively report on their policies and challenges to the Commission, which responds with ‘Country Specific Recommendations’ (CSRs) that the Council adopts, possibly after amendment, in July. The Country Specific Recommendations can be quite detailed. The 2015 Recommendation for France, for example, requests a review or abolition of the numerus clausus for health professional education (9244/15). France is in an Excessive Deficit Procedure, so in theory France could be fined for failing to review the numerus clausus. That kind of detailed instruction about domestic health policy is a novelty in EU history. Countries in Economic Adjustment Programmes are exempted from Semester participation; the EU already plays a significant role in their policy-making through the Troika.

The legal bases for the Semester are in three places. One is the Stability and Growth Pact. Country Specific Recommendations based on the Stability and Growth Pact address threats to member state compliance. The second is in the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP). This is a new procedure in the six-pack that tasks the Commission, as ratified by the Council, with identifying the kind of destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that led to debt crises in Spain and Ireland. Those countries had been very fiscally rigorous until their economies suffered major collapses and their governments took on private bank liabilities. The Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure is supposed to identify and force the correction of imbalances that might lead to a repeat of those events. The third legal base applies only to the European Semester and is currently the Europe 2020 strategy, a set of EU priorities agreed in 2010 under the previous Commission president (and largely overlapping with the voluntary 2011 Euro Plus Pact, which encourages ‘competitiveness’ through a member state agreement to make changes such as abolishing wage indexation, harmonizing corporate taxes and raising pension ages). It is a set of recommendations intended to make the EU a stronger and more competitive economy, including goals such as environmental protection and higher employment. Only the Stability and Growth Pact and Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure-based recommendations have legal force but compliance with the Europe 2020-based Country Specific Recommendations might give a country a good reputation with others, especially the European Central Bank, should it encounter problems, or would help a country in the Excessive Deficit Procedure to make a case for its improving behaviour. Country Specific Recommendation compliance is also increasingly tightly linked to eligibility for EU Structural and Investment Funds.

Much of the content of the six-pack and two-pack is duplicated in the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, along with the obligation to constitutionalize the Stability and Growth Pact limits (a ‘debt brake’ in the original German), so that it can be enforced by the member state courts, and access to financial resources for compliant states in case of another debt crisis. The UK and Czech Republic refused to join the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, so it is an intergovernmental treaty serviced by the European Commission. Because much of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance is already in EU law thanks to the six-pack and two-pack, and under that the Stability and Growth Pact which all member states have agreed, the implications of non-accession are surprisingly small (the Czechs also ratified the European Stability Mechanism Treaty, amending Article 136 to enable future conditional lending by future Troikas to distressed eurozone states). There is some speculation that the Country Specific Recommendations are milder and less intrusive for non-eurozone states with delicate politics, notably the UK, but evidence is inconclusive so far (Azzopardi-Muscat et al. Reference Azzopardi-Muscat, Clemens, Stoner and Brand2015; Stamati and Baeten, Reference Stamati and Baeten2015). Likewise, it is clear that non-eurozone and non-Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance states are at some remove from eurozone policy-making (for example, their finance ministers are not part of the eurogroup), but much of the formal structure still applies across the EU (Figure 1).

Parliaments and consultation with civil society are deliberately sidelined. The European Parliament is merely allowed to comment on the progress of the Semester and is kept informed through bilateral inter-institutional agreements that sharply limit what its members know or can make public about, for example, the activities of the European Central Bank. Member state parliaments are largely absent from the procedure, with their role dependent on their ability to shape their governments’ participation (for example, through scrutiny of submissions to the Semester). The Semester shares much, including key committees such as the Social Protection Committee, with the older and massively researched Open Method of Coordination. Even here, though, it reduces the ability of citizens to participate meaningfully in the exercise of power. The Open Method of Coordination, unlike the Semester, contained a commitment to consultation with civil society. Civil society advocates are still searching for ways to engage in the Semester.

Political Citizenship, Social Citizenship and EU Fiscal Governance

This section has reviewed three major changes in the operation of the EU since 2008, all driven or justified by the financial crisis and all focused on fiscal and economic policies, but with important consequences for citizenship. The first, the Troika, is a mechanism that certainly reduces the ability of citizens of states in receivership to participate meaningfully in the exercise of power. It is not new in the history of sovereign debt for states to lose sovereignty to creditors (Dyson Reference Dyson2014), but inasmuch as the institutions of the Troika are all more distanced from any country’s voters than their elected government, the result is a reduction of political citizenship in those countries. The second, the protagonism of the European Central Bank, also marks an erosion of political citizenship even relative to countries with independent central banks, since whatever formal and informal feedback mechanisms existed for a given central bank were country specific and did not translate to the European Central Bank (Hancké Reference Hancké2013).

The Troika and the European Central Bank’s actions were constituted as temporary expedients for a few countries. The new fiscal governance is, in theory, the permanent solution for all countries. The objective is to create a hard budget constraint on governments through hardened laws, extensive policy and fiscal surveillance, and more automatic enforcement. Unsurprisingly, a system designed to constrain government expenditures, macroeconomic developments and the policies behind them constrains what governments can do. It thereby limits what citizens can ask of them, reducing the scope of what member states do and expanding the scope and importance of what much less democratic institutions do. A distrust of elected officials leads to policies that erode the political rights of the citizens who elected them. In terms of social citizenship rights, the new fiscal governance could conceivably, under certain circumstances, go with a strong welfare state, but in practice it is pointing to substantial constraints on government expenditure. Little suggests that this improves or maintains social citizenship. There is certainly no expansive (or expensive) new EU social or political citizenship established to replace the constrained member state citizenship.

None of the three changes directly affects civil citizenship, which is also under some political pressure. Some governments are challenging the basic right to free movement and access to benefits in other EU member states. The UK is particularly visible in this area, incorporating restrictions on benefits eligibility for recent migrants into its requests for treaty changes. Governments can restrict the social rights of citizens from other EU countries by simply expanding eligibility requirements (for example, making benefits conditional on a certain number of years in work). Insofar as this happens, the key social citizenship rights that flow from civil citizenship in the EU are curtailed – and in pursuit of curtailing rights for migrants in a non-discriminatory fashion, governments adopting that strategy are also likely to curtail their own citizens’ social rights. Finally, there is the separate issue of the treatment of refugees and undocumented migrants, the most vulnerable of third-country nationals. While the scenes of refugees in Europe are dramatic, the member state rights and responsibilities surrounding them have not yet formally changed. From a legal and institutional point of view, civil citizenship rights in the EU have been quite stable in the crisis, and what changes can be found are incremental and mostly applicable to cross-border social citizenship rights. Whether they will remain stable remains to be seen.