Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

certain Member States, primarily with immigrational experiences. 196 From the perspective of the acquisition ex actu , one may encounter as many approaches as there are Member States; wherefore, the exception is no iura theoretically presented above. As it is not in the capacity of this monograph to list and define every different law, may the reader consult the GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset for a broader overview. 197 The form-status of citizenship of the Union emerges at the exact moment as the nationality of a Member State does; therefore, the emergence of Union citizenship is constructed on all these iura present in the Member States. For these reasons, D. Kochenov defines the rule of the acquisition of Union citizenship as ‘ ius tractum ’ 198 — the right derived. Union citizenship may be acquired variedly on the basis of the acquisition of the nationality of a Member State; however, at the end of the day, it is acquired derivatively from the Member State’s nationality — through ius tractum . Different Member States’ iura — whether ius sanguinis, ius soli, ius familias or others — are hence not actual iura of Union citizenship stricto sensu but are only prerequisite to the acquisition through ius tractum , which may thus be the principle of either the acquisition ex lege or the acquisition ex actu . To acquire Union citizenship is nevertheless possible also under another rule, symptomatic only of the Union — by the accession of a new Member State to the European Union. 199 At the moment of the accession, all 196 Id est , Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal; to that effect, see ibid. 197 Ibid. 198 ‘From the Latin trahere — “derive,” “get.”’ To that effect, see Dimitry Kochenov, ‘Ius Tractum of Many Faces: European Citizenship and the Difficult Relationship between Status and Rights’ (2009) 15/2 Columbia Journal of European Law 181. 199 W. Worster, however, poses a question of whether the automatic acquisition of Union citizenship through accession to the European Union applies without further. He presents a rather interesting argument that primary law contains only a mechanism for the acquisition of Union citizenship only mutually with the acquisition of Member State’s nationality; wherefore, ‘it could be argued that once a person received his non-EU member state nationality (at birth or naturalization) [ ex lege or ex actu ], he or she missed the chance to get EU citizenship, notwithstanding his or her state‘s later accession to the EU’. To that effect, see William Thomas Worster, ‘Brexit as an Arbitrary Withdrawal of European Union Citizenship’ (2021) 33/1 Florida Journal of International Law 110-111 accessed 15 th May 2023. Nevertheless, the author does not agree with this interpretation as the derivative nature of the acquisition of Union citizenship logically only implies from the wording of the Treaties, whilst the Treaties do not provide any explicit mechanism of the acquisition of Union citizenship.

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