Integrating Europe and Demarcating States

The triumph of liberal constitutionalism in Europe after 1989 appeared to herald the end of a hard, limiting (nation) statehood and thereby to increasingly suspend the key function of citizenship—the granting of political affiliation, security, equality, and freedom. Human rights-based protections of individual freedom, as well as the legal consolidation and geographical expansion of European integration, call for new transnational concepts and institutions of political affiliation, which find their focus in European Union citizenship. However, this chapter, stretching from 1989 to the present, analyses how new, conflict-laden disputes about the borders of nation-states and their political affiliation are reviving old rivalries, particularly in the eastern states of the “New Europe.” The return to a protective concept of citizenship defining political affiliation according to imperial motives or ethnic criteria justifies doubts about the influential thesis claiming convergence in citizenship policy in Europe. The crises of Brexit, anti-immigration populism, and Covid instead remind citizens of Europe of their nationality.