Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

4. LEGAL CHARACTER OF UNION CITIZENSHIP: NONVICARIOUSNESS? The premise that either the factual relation or the legal relation should provide protection for a citizen of the Union against an involuntary deprivation of his or her Union citizenship unreservedly by a Member State has been presented in Chapter 2. Nonetheless, the factual relation in the form of the genuine link has not been found. What remains is the legal relation in the developed concept of the direct bond. Hence, if the presence of the direct bond in Union citizenship is found, such a legal relation could not be severed by any legal entity other than the European Union or a Union citizen. To find the direct bond in citizenship of the Union, two prerequisites must be met — whether the formstatus of Union citizenship may be considered autonomous, and whether the contentrights of Union citizenship may be considered nonvicarious. The former is the focal point of this chapter. In contrast with the form-status, as has been indicated several times, the historical evolution of the content-rights of Union citizenship is deliberately omitted in this monograph due to the numerous other research works that have done so, elaboration of which would thus be redundant. Therefore, this monograph stands on the shoulders of giants. 252 On this basis, the assessment of whether the nonvicarious contentrights is present in citizenship of the Union is constructed, firstly, upon a reasonably brief overview of legal scholarship in terms of the possibility of imagining rights springing from a structure other than a ‘nation-state’; 253 and, secondly, if that is proven, which particular rights directly and nonvicariously stream from the European Union towards a Union citizen and thus give rise to the content-rights complement — directness — of the direct bond in citizenship of the Union. The considerations are given more to the noninterference of Member States’ legal orders with the Union’s one than to the actual organisation of the exercise of rights. 4.1 Nonvicarious Rights Springing from ‘Non-Nation-State’ The whole doctrine of citizenship has been, for a long time, dictated by the approach of assessing citizenship purely through the lens of its content — its rights, as has already been mentioned, 254 primarily by

252 See note 14 above. 253 As the European Union definitely is not a ‘nation-state’. 254 See note 156 above.

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