Boundaries of citizenship: federal perspectives and democratic minimum standards in the EU

In recent decades, we have witnessed a growing mismatch between systemic interdependencies and political structures as well as political identities, calling for strategies to cope and create new systems of policymaking above and beyond the nation state. In this context, the traditional bounded concept of citizenship has increasingly been put into question. The paper asks whether multilevel conceptions of citizenship can offer a response to the double challenge of both, broadening access to rights and deepening civic practices so that democratic citizenship will assert its meaning and importance. The reflections focus on the EU context and elaborate paths for the further (federal) development of EU citizenship. Since EU citizens’ rights are (partly) decoupled from national membership, traditional unitary conceptions of citizenship must be reconsidered. While recognizing a particular tension between federal structures of decision-making and democratic self-determination the article attempts to develop democratic minimum standards for federal citizenship in compound polities such as the EU. Within this frame, a variety of democratic practices and traditions can be explored, and democratic citizenship be deepened.