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The EU is already vying with its member states over the concept of citizenship something which is vital for the EU to progress towards its eventual goal. In order to maintain its advantage in the citizenship

a policy of prohibiting dual citizenship between member states would be seen as unreasonable and opposed to the spirit of European integration.

stakes, the EU has to enhance its claim to be our nation state and that it in fact does speak for its citizens. Rather than allowing the member states to maintain their position as guardian of EU citizenship the EU must eventually become the body which decides who would become an EU citizen.

Thus the central EU leadership begin the next steps in demolishing the nationality of the member states, because the EU feels that as the EU does not have legal authority to grant the status of citizen; which at the moment can only be acquired through nationality of a member state. It must therefore challenge the exclusive competence of the member states to determine who is a national, and therefore an EU citizen. It must open up a second avenue for acquiring Union citizenship and bypassing the gate keepers to union citizenship.

I mentioned in part 2 that the amendment to the citizenship clause added in the Amsterdam Treaty, goes some way towards temporarily weakening the fundamentally pro-federalist interpretation of the EU citizenship. Temporally because the The EU now begins to introduce a basic challenge to the states guarding of the gateway to EU citizenship. The EU bases its argument for this challenge on a claimed right for the Union to decide who is subjected to the EC law.

The EU does not have legal authority to grant the status of citizen; this can only be acquired through nationality of one of the Member States. The exclusive competence of the Member States to determine who is a national, and therefore an EU citizen, deprives the Community of the right to decide who is subjected to the EC law. Issuing legal provisions for ‘unknown subjects is rightly considered to be anomalous.

Not actually really any more irregular than issuing legal provisions for a citizen who cannot hold the EU to account, or forcing dual citizenship on us all.

But the EU naturally only looks at things from the perspective of EU integration and considerers that a policy of prohibiting dual citizenship between member states would be seen as unreasonable and opposed to the spirit of European integration.

The purely decorative and symbolic institution of EU citizenship is designed to eventually replace the citizenship of the member states then national citizenship would become a left over and subsidiary form of membership of a similar kind as the provincial citizenships that exist in other federal states. Fundamental rights as well as the rules of acquisition, transmission and loss of citizenship would be the same throughout the Union.

Each of the member states has developed different rules for conferring citizenship to third country residents, in some they must have been a resident for 8 years in others 5 years and so on. The EU argues that this is wrong, how can there be so many different ways to acquire citizenship of the EU, however by arguing in this way the EU clearly implied it intention to influence the conferral of national citizenship, even though this was in contempt with provisions of the agreed by members states in the Treaties.

Of course this directive does interfere with the Member States autonomy in establishing nationality legislations.

We can see that what the member states agree in a treaty has no influence on the action of the EU which is always prepared to go beyond the treaties in order to advance the process of integration.

Notwithstanding the provisions agreed on in Maastricht, and amended in Amsterdam the EU aspires to influence the setting of conditions determining access to national citizenship.

But as it has no authority to force the issue the EU instead decided to use soft power to achieve its ends.

The EU says of soft law.

The Commission eventually managed despite objections from some member states to get the EU`s aspirations set down in an official document, this of course would lead to it being in a position to further develop its objectives. Hence the issues of immigration and integration policy dominated the Tampere Summit s as can be seen by the communiqué Tampere Summit Conclusions

The EU continued to develop its attack on the member states sovereignty the commission issued a proposal for a Directive July 2001 but the member states held out and the Commission re-launched the attack in 2004 Green Paper on an EU approach to managing economic migration (COM (2004) 811). And continued until they reached agreement in 2005 leading to a policy plan legal migration (COM (2005) 669) which lists the actions and legislative initiatives that the Commission intends to take, so as to pursue the consistent development of the EU legal migration policy.

Of course this directive does interfere with the Member States autonomy in establishing nationality legislations. Something that had been a big sticking point but the states went along with the proposals because by this time other EU polices were creating an impetus that the states found hard to resist.

Largely as a result of EU policies such as the internal market, many decisions taken on the national level now have a cross-border impact this in turn has led to increasing power being transferred from the national to the EU level.

This is usually referred to as the spillover effect,

“the initial movement of powers to the EU level and then the EU legalisation in those areas of power creates a series of situations that can be dealt with only by a further expansion of EU powers.

Evidence of one states ability to affect all the others and of the impetus for the states to work together under the umbrella of the EU becomes apparent when considering the Spanish authorities issued an amnesty for illegal immigrants working in Spain in 2005, 700 000 illegal immigrants were granted legal residence status. Although that is only the first step on the road to full citizenship Spain has such a lax attitude over citizenship that an illegal immigrant who was granted residence would only have to wait 2 years before being granted Spanish citizenship and thus EU citizenship and of course then legally able to live and work in any other member state.

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