Book Review: Research Handbook on European Union Citizenship Law and Policy. Navigating Challenges and Crises by Dora Kostakopoulou, Daniel Thym (eds)
Published date | 01 March 2024 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627241232147 |
Author | Kamila Feddek |
Date | 01 March 2024 |
Dora Kostakopoulou, Daniel Thym (eds), Research Handbook on European Union Citizenship Law and Policy.
Navigating Challenges and Crises, E. Elgar: Cheltenham, 2022, 424 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78897-289-5.
Reviewed by: Kamila Feddek ,University of Glasgow, UK
DOI: 10.1177/13882627241232147
The Research Handbook on European Union Citizenship Law and Policy is published in the Elgar
Handbooks in European Law series. The subject is highly topical due to changing trends in the case
law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and challenges faced by individual Member
States dealingwith the implications ofevents such as Brexit, COVID-19and specific issues associated
with the freedomof movement of persons. Thecontributions form 22 chapters,grouped into four parts.
The purpose of this handbook is to discuss the legal, political and contextual factors underlying
the critical turn in legal studies and in the academic research on Union citizenship. To achieve these
goals, the editors, Dora Kostakopoulou (Professor of European Union Law, European Integration
and Public Policy at KU Leuven, Belgium) and Daniel Thym (Professor of Public, European and
International Law and Director of the Research Centre Immigration and Asylum Law at the
University of Konstanz, Germany) have brought together established expert authors with wide-
ranging academic backgrounds. Both editors have themselves carried out comprehensive research
on EU citizenship and have published extensively on this subject.
Part I focuses on rather well-established theoretical approaches and does not provide signifi-
cantly new ideas. Steinfield, for instance, offers a high-quality overview of the social-constructivist
approach to the evolution of EU citizenship, but he leaves out some innovative recent papers, such
as Union Citizenship and Beyond (D’Oliveira, 2018) or EU Citizenship as a Means of Broadening
the Application of EU Fundamental Rights: Developments and Limits (Kalaitzaki; 2020) on this
topic, which are not (yet) well established. Nonetheless, he provides various suggestions of how
research in this area could further develop, and readers can definitely draw inspiration from
these. One idea is to adapt the proposed methodological ‘toolkit’to examine the inherent gaps
or deficiencies in past and present EU citizenship, including its roots in an economic concept
and its present form, from which people may be excluded by virtue of not being European.
Parts II and III focus on judicial developments in multi-faceted case law: access to social benefits
by economically non-active citizens, culminating in the Dano and Alimanovic rulings; the immi-
gration status of third-country national family members since the Zambrano case; and residence
rights of criminal offenders. All chapters in both parts recapitulate well-known legal discourses
on citizens’rights, but they do not contain any substantially novel findings.
The chapter by Coutts on the legality of Member State measures in relation to the free movement
and Schengen legal framework provides a stimulating discussion on the impact of the COVID-19
crisis on the emerging notion of territory in legal studies on Union citizenship, from which readers
can learn. Noteworthy is the examination of interactions between Member State and Union
notions of territory and territoriality, which could generate further research. The author, in his contri-
bution, argues that COVID-19 reaffirmed the centrality of ‘hard’Member State territoriality and the
‘soft’nature of Union spatiality andthat the pandemic revealed that Member States remain central as
political–territorial units in the area of citizenship. Another particularly interesting chapter is written
by Young, who analyses ‘EU citizenship as a legal gateway to fundamental rights protection’and
offers a high-quality overview of relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
86 European Journal of Social Security 26(1)
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