Co-creating European Union citizenship : institutional process and crescive norms

By paying attention to processes and institutional change, EU citizenship emerges as a co-created institution. It is the product of institutional design and co-creation by actors at all levels of governance and is shaped by multilogues at the ‘top’, ‘bottom’ and ‘sideways’ as well as by citizens’ formal and informal actions. A co-creation perspective leads us to reconsider state-centered assumptions about which form of citizenship should be predominant and the dualism of centralism (supra-nationalism) versus ‘home-rule’ (inter-governmentalism) and to embrace a genuinely citizen-centered perspective. The article develops the co-creation paradigm, examines its dimensions, various forms and patterns and, by discussing the post-Rottmann and Zambrano case law (McCarthy, Dereci, Iida, O., S. and L. and Ymeraga) as well as Tsakouridis and P.I., sheds light onto the complex dynamics that make EU citizenship a vehicle of transformative institutional change but can also work against it