The Politics of European Citizenship

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Peo Hansen. The Politics of European Citizenship

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The Politics of European Citizenship

European Citizenship

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3.) What are the specific structural barriers or limitations within citizenship practices that help account for the EU’s deepening crisis of legitimacy?

In outlining these specific aims, we should also be careful to explicitly delimit our analysis; to outline from the beginning what our book is not trying to cover. Firstly, this is not a book replete with citizenship and migration policy recommendations. As we will describe more fully in our theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1, our critical approach attempts to stand back from the existing literature’s fixation with policy prescription and endorsement, to uncover historically the social power relations underpinning citizenship politics in the EU. This does not mean that we accept a separation of theory and practice, but rather that the political practice we envision is not limited to given formal institutional structures. As is implied in critical analysis, the radical nature of the knowledge offered in this book is more likely to inform the political practices that go beyond mere policy recommendations to EU institutions. Second, this is not a book that engages systematically with quantitative data on migration. We do undoubtedly make reference to this data to back up our arguments in empirical analysis, yet this is by no means our focal point. This data is readily available in the EU documents we cite and also in some of our existing works (see Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). In all, we feel strongly that this book is venturing into the relatively uncharted territory of critical political economy analysis in the realm of EU citizenship studies. As an exploratory exercise, we hope that our analysis will pave the way for more specific engagement with various facets of citizenship politics, including critical analysis of the relationship between EU and the various national citizenship regimes.

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