How Young People See EU and Enlargement
Third Question Interpretation - EU citizenship - Group work: Rossetti, Delbello
Our work consisted in analyzing the answers to the third question: “Do you know who can have the European citizenship? ”. This question is relevant in order to check the knowledge of young people about the conditions necessary to be European citizens.
Citizenship is the membership of a political community.
The Maastricht Treaty (that came into force on 1 November 1993 and set into motion political integration) introduced the concept of citizenship of the European Union. Citizenship rises from national citizenship: if one holds the nationality of a EU Member State he automatically becomes a "citizen of the Union".
EU citizenship offers certain rights and privileges within the EU:
  • the right of abode,
  • the right to vote
  • the right to stand in local and European elections
  • the right to apply to work.

EU Member States also use a common passport. Union citizenship becomes more and more important
  • the European Court of Justice has stated that it will be the "fundamental status of nationals of Member States" (see Case C-184/99 Rudy Grzelczyk v Centre Public d'Aide Sociale d'Ottignes-Louvain-la-Neuve, [2001] ECR I-6193, para 31)
  • The European Commission has affirmed that Union citizenship should be the fundamental status of EU nationals
However this is not accepted by many of the Member States of the European Union.To make the meaning of this peculiatr different citizenshipclear, we searched for a case discussed in the European court of Justice: we found the “Chen Case”.
Catherine Chen was born on 16 September 2000 in Belfast from Chinese parents who were working for a Chinese firm in Britain. The child's mother, Mrs Chen, had purposely chosen Northern Ireland as a birthplace for her second child, whose birth in China would have contravened China's One Child Policy. As Catherine's parents were only temporary migrants, she would not have received British citizenship if her mother had given her birth in Britain. However, by giving her birth in Belfast, Mrs Chen automatically obtained Irish citizenship for her daughter, with the intention of using the child's status as a European Union national to move the family permanently to Cardiff, in Wales.
Eventually, British authorities rejected the Chen’s applications for permits to reside permanently in Britain. The case was taken to the European Court of Justice, which ruled that, as a citizen of the European Union, Catherine Chen has an inalienable right to reside anywhere in the EU, and that denying residency to her parents at a time when she is unable to look after herself, would conflict with this basic right.
After data collecting, cataloguing the 105 answers into a table made up of four columns and four lines started.
In the lines we classified the level of knowledge into “ No Knowledge”, “Superficial”, “Reasonable” and “Detailed”; in the columns we entered information about the interviewed: “Total number”, “Men”, “Woman”, “Average Age” in order to draw conclusions that would single out a relation between the two criteria (the interviewed and their knowledge).
It soon became evident that the great part of the interviewed were rather confused between the different citizenships the national and the European one. This is easily understandable if we consider that the two aspects are strictly connected and that in many places EU citizenship rights coincide with the rights of the native citizens of the Member States.
This is the reason why we could not judge any of the answers produced as detailed and could only consider 15 answers as reasonable. We judged an answer reasonable when in the terms of the question posed there was the need to distinguish between national and european citizenship. The average age of the interviewed was of three years older than the other, more superficial and it must be recognized that men answered more correctly. The great part of the interviewed answered superficially (76 people) and the great part of them were women. Fourteen people had no clues about EU citizenhip and among them thenumber of women was double in respect to men.
The analysis allows to draw meaningful considerations: younger people and women are less interested in knowing about EU, and there great misunderstanding between the ideas on national and European citizenship.