Last week, the CJEU declared Malta’s citizenship for investment scheme incompatible with EU law for it “amounts to the commercialisation of the granting of the status of […] Union citizenship, which is incompatible with the conception of that fundamental status that stems from the Treaties (90).” Setting aside the perhaps questionable quality and defensibility of the Court’s legal reasoning (see here and here), the decision clearly casts Union citizenship as a status constituted by meanings and norms specific to the European Union as a normative legal project: it “is one of the principal concrete expression of the solidarity which forms the very basis of the process of integration […] and which is an integral part of the identity of the European Union as a specific legal system [93].” If citizenship status requires the presence of a relationship “of solidarity and good faith [98]” between the state and the individual, it follows that not every individual can be declared a citizen as a conceptual matter, nor following the Court’s decision, as a matter of EU law.
What are we to make of this conception of citizenship, and its use by the Court to strike down citizenship for investment schemes? Because I am no EU lawyer, I approach these questions from the perspective of normative legal theory, specifically liberal legal theory, which I believe should inform the Court’s citizenship jurisprudence.
Citation
Anja Bossow, What is Citizenship For?, Verfassungblog (2025).