Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

became a stateless person without a majority of the freedoms and rights, which she had enjoyed before. One might wonder how this person, who had utilised and enjoyed her freedoms and rights ensured by European Union law and, primarily, had no intention to renounce her citizenship of the Union voluntarily, 7 could be deprived of all of that only on the basis of the decision of the Member State not to grant her promised nationality. In this monograph, the author constructs research upon a premise that a citizen of the Union should be provided protection — against an involuntary deprivation of his or her Union citizenship unreservedly by a Member State — either through the factual relation between a Union citizen and the European Union or through the legal relation between the same subjects. The author subsequently defines the factual relation as a mutual societal attachment and shared political interests, which mirrors the principle of the genuine link. Whilst the legal relation is depicted as an autonomous legal form and nonvicarious legal content, which reflects in the author’s developed concept of the direct bond . It must be emphasised that the author deliberately distinguishes between factual relation and legal relation on the one hand, and factual relationship and legal relationship on the other. The term relation refers to a qualified connection between two subjects, and which either exists or not with no gradual scale inbetween. In contrast, the term relationship is utilised as every ordinary connection between two subjects, and which may have different ranges of quality. Whence it follows that, since the European Union and citizens of the Union exist, the factual relationship and the legal relationship exist by the very nature of things. Nevertheless, the question is whether these relationships are of such quality that they give rise to the factual relation in the form of the genuine link or the legal relation in the form of the direct bond. With the kindest regards, the reader should bear that distinction in his or her mind also. The premise materialises in the following reasoning. Suppose that the factual relationship between the European Union and a Union citizen is of the quality of the mutual societal attachment and shared political interests, which may thus be interpreted as that Union citizens do believe they are members of one shared europaios demos . 8 7 Case C-118/20 Wiener Landesregierung [2021] EU:C:2022:34, paragraph 36. 8 Regarding the believe, D. Miller proposes an argument for the rationale behind the nationality as ‘a nationality exists when its members believe that it does’. That author liken this conception to demos ; ergo, he would paraphrase as ‘a demos exists when its members believe that it does’. To that effect, see David Miller, ‘In Defence of Nationality’ (1993) 10/1 Journal of Applied Philosophy 6 accessed 18 th June 2023.

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