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This paper has sought to demonstrate how essential it is to contextualise discussions of EU citizenship, showing to its fullest possible extent the intellectual space within which citizenship debates must always occur. A number of contexts have been highlighted as offering the vital background, including:
- the nationalism/identity matrix, as it operates in relation to the specific transnational or supranational institutional developments involving political and socio-economic integration, such as the European Union; - the role which citizenship has played, and will play, in the body of EU policies, both as a `constitutional figure' and as part of day-to-day policy-making within the single market framework; - the positive contribution to the legitimacy of the European Union which an active and participatory concept of social citizenship may make, especially it involves the fullest possible range of membership rights, and feeds into the emerging political culture of a European civil society. It is not to be thought that this comment implies that `European citizenship' will take over from national citizenship, but that even as a residual or complementary concept it must seek to be a rounded notion which contributes to, rather than undermines, the overall legitimacy of governance structures. Although this context may so far offer no more than a rather sketchy background, in so far as the actual rights of citizenship are as yet very patchy, it is always useful to retain an overall notion of an ideal-type of citizenship.
Alongside context, method has also been shown to be vitally important. The ideal-type referred to above remains just that. In terms of the practical functionality of the citizenship figure within the contemporary European Union, it is important to deploy methods which take seriously the historical development of citizenship rights within a variety of fora, including in the Treaties themselves (in their original form, and as subsequently amended by the Member States), in the outputs of the legislative organs of the European Union, in the statements of policy intent which embody the Commission's policy enterpreneurship, and last, but by no means least, in the Court of Justice's case law. It was suggested in Section III that the methods or approaches to issues of European governance developed within the broad `institutionalist' school offer the most appropriate tools to studying and explaining the role of the citizenship figure. This point follows naturally also from the evident utility of varieties of institutionalism for developing interdisciplinary perspectives upon the broader role of law and legal phenomena in the context of EU integration processes.[450] These approaches may offer also the best predictive tools for ascertaining how the EU might, in the future, be developed. Like so much of the constitutional fabric of the European Union, of course, citizenship as under close scrutiny, at the time of writing, within the framework of the ongoing 1996/97 `Maastricht II' Intergovernmental Conference. The outcome of that IGC will be vitally important for the future development of citizenship. However, such constitutional outputs will never be the only `resources' of citizenship practice in the European Union. We may have begun with Article 8 EC. We moved quickly, however, to refer to and to discuss the nature and contents of the `dispersed' rights enjoyed by EU citizens and by third country nationals whose situation is so often closely related to that of EU citizens even if they are excluded from the formal contours of the concept. It is with this important reference point - the plurality of the sources and resources of EU citizenship, and their vital developmental potential - moreover, that we must conclude.
[450] See generally Armstrong, op. cit. supra n.181.