European citizenship and immigration after Amsterdam: Openings, silences, paradoxes

European Union citizenship, as a form of citizenship beyond the nation state, entails the promise of the formation of a heterogeneous and democratic European public, empowering citizens and ethnic residents. Notwithstanding this promise, the 1996 intergovernmental conference that culminated in the Treaty of Amsterdam (signed on 2 October 1997) did not extend the personal scope of Union citizenship to include long-term resident third country nationals. Other substantive reforms, however, such as the inclusion of an anti-discrimination clause, the institutionalisation of the right to information, the strengthening of democratic accountability and the enhanced respect for human rights, all improve the rights of citizens, and ethnic migrant residents and members of other disadvantaged groups generally. The partial communitarisation of the third pillar has furnished the basis for a Community immigration and asylum policy that is subject to increasing democratic and judicial control. However, it has also opened the way for the installation of exclusionary categories and the ‘security’ narrative on immigration control, which has largely characterised the third pillar within the system of Community law