Co-creating European Union Citizenship: Institutional Process and Crescive Norms

By focusing on processes and institutional change, EU citizenship emerges as a co-created institution. It is the product of institutional design and co-creation by actors at all levels of governance and is shaped by multilogues at the ‘top’, ‘bottom’ and ‘sideways’, as well as by citizens’ formal and informal actions. A co-creation perspective leads us to reconsider state-centred assumptions about which form of citizenship should be predominant and the dualism of centralism (supra-nationalism) versus ‘home-rule’ (intergovernmentalism), and to embrace a genuinely citizen-centred perspective. The chapter develops the co-creation paradigm, examines its dimensions, various forms and patterns and, by discussing the post- Rottmann and Zambrano case law ( McCarthy, Dereci, Iida, O, S and L and Ymeraga ) as well as Tsakouridis and PI , sheds light onto the complex dynamics that make EU citizenship a vehicle of transformative institutional change but that can also work against it.