Given the plethora of books and articles dedicated to the scrutiny of European citizenship, Peo Hansen and Sandy Brian Hager's claim of entering a ‘relatively uncharted territory’ (p. 13) seems daring at first. However, in a persuasive critical review of two so far dominating accounts of European citizenship policy-making − post-national cosmopolitanism and multilevel governance − the authors powerfully expose the limitations of present analyses. This review concentrates on a critical appraisal of Hansen and Hager's alternative analytical framework and empirical contribution.

Being more interested in societal outcomes (post-national cosmopolitanism) or in the institutional dynamics underpinning policy-making (multilevel governance), none of the existing theoretical approaches, according to Hansen and Hager, is able to capture the evolution of power dynamics involved in European citizenship policy-making. Yet, it is by analysing these struggles over the meaning of EU citizenship and the concomitant rights regime that we can start to understand what is at stake in alleged policy failures, such as no-votes in recent EU referenda. By drawing together a convincing analytical framework and exceptionally rich empirical data, The Politics of European Citizenship fills a major void in both political science and political economy approaches in European Studies.

Hansen and Hager's analytical approach is historically bound and critical. It perceives the current citizenship regime in Europe as product of preceding political struggles over its meaning. Essential to their ‘critical-historical framework’, the authors argue, ‘is the examination of capitalist market structures in engendering asymmetrical power relations, which crucially shape the context of citizenship politics’ (p. 22). With their colours thus nailed to the mast, Hansen and Hager cut to the very heart of a philosophical debate about aims and functions of policy analysis and the logics of social science inquiry (Fischer, Reference Fischer, Hajer and Wagenaar2003). Instead of taking for granted shape and content of contemporary European citizenship and analysing it in isolation from the socio-economic regimes that have gradually favoured its emergence, the authors locate prior power struggles over meaning and normative directions in the policy field at the core of their analytical quests. European integration or multilevel decision-making is no independent variable from this perspective, the processes that have led to the contemporary rights regime and institutional framework governing EU citizens and residents become fundamental part of the empirical analysis.

This analysis exposes: (1) who benefited from changes of direction and level of policy-making, (2) at what points of time and in what socio-economic context and (3) with what consequences for different populations governed by the policy (with a special focus on non-EU migrants). The first part of the empirical analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 contextualises more recent practices historically by delineating both the origins of EU citizenship (1950–80) and initial changes to the agenda when attempts to create a Single Market intensified after the 1980s. Hansen and Hager pinpoint the emergence of neoliberal-communitarian citizenship as a political agenda intrinsically linked to the Union's economic integration project. Part two of the book revisits more recent policy developments (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) such as the EU's Lisbon Strategy, the Amsterdam Treaty or The Hague Programme against this historical backdrop. Most importantly, this contextualised analysis finds a widening asymmetry between national level social policies and supranational market making in favour of the latter. Given the lack of positive integration of the social and political aspects of citizenship across the EU to date, the increasing influence of the supranational realm in areas such as labour mobility and labour market regulation has thinned national citizenship models. Due to the nature of their analysis with a focus on EU level policy documents and statements, the authors are unable to accommodate a more nuanced picture of member states’ scope for individual negotiations and contestations of EU level developments (e.g. Menz Reference Menz2005), or additional internal policy fragmentations and migrant stratification systems (e.g. Carmel et al. Reference Carmel, Cerami and Papadopoulos2011).

Instead, Hansen and Hager's crucial contribution lies in the empirically well-founded revelation of the ways in which history and politics continue to matter in EU policy-making. Their historically anchored analysis stoutly demonstrates that the origins of some contemporary key contradictions go way back and have been favoured in the development of a specific socio-economic formation over decades. For example, the co-evolution of a rights dimension of citizenship (emphasising economic belonging) and a identity dimension (highlighting a shared Judeo-Christian heritage), and their increasing entanglement since the 1980s, helps explaining the notionally contradictory co-existence of high demand for informal migrant workers from outside the EU as cheap labour and their staging as potential security threats − especially if of Muslim faith − in need of tough assimilation measures. In a similar vein, the authors explain how the hollowing out of social aspects of citizenship in the EU and its repercussions in member states (i.e. unemployment, increasing social inequalities) further fuels the kind of xenophobic and protectionist backlashes against migrant workers − even where fellow Europeans − that the EU officially aims to combat with its equal treatment and anti-discrimination agenda.

From a classic social policy lens preoccupied with equality and justice, Hansen and Hager showcase how unequally mobility rights are distributed in Europe: while resourceful and high skilled ‘Eurostars’ (Favell, Reference Favell2008) have benefited from vanishing borders within Europe and seemingly fulfilled the ideal of flexible labour mobility in the knowledge-based economy, the movement rights of other workers − poorer EU nationals and many ‘unwanted’ categories of migrants − have been curtailed de jure or de facto. It is an important analytical advancement to view migration and EU internal free movement as part of the same citizenship regime (also see Paul, Reference Paul2011). Yet, the question of winners and losers of EU citizenship politics might not just be one of cross-national class and ethnic divisions; it might reflect power asymmetries between centre and periphery in Europe which the authors have not sufficiently addressed. The on-going negotiations over a Greek bail-out show quite overt dominations of previously national social policy and citizenship models by the EU, its currency union and its main financial contributors Germany and France.

Even though the authors explicitly resist the temptation of predicting trajectories of European citizenship politics, Hansen and Hager's critical historical account projects stunningly precise shadows into the future. Power asymmetries between a diminishing realm of national social citizenship policies on the one hand, and a growing supranational impetus of one-sided budgetary discipline and market rescue on the other hand − if anything − have intensified in the current economic crisis scenario. The Politics of European Citizenship therefore constitutes a key resource for everyone aiming to systematically unpick some of the key policy tensions of European integration project; more than that, it is an extremely well and entertainingly written account of a highly complex and contradictory policy terrain.