Presented by the ANU Centre for European Studies and the Centre for Commercial Law

Listen to the audio recording of this event on ANU Soundcloud

This lecture by Professor Jo Shaw will examine the impact of the European Union upon citizenship, and will use the two cases of Brexit and stalled enlargement in south east Europe in order to study the partial, fragmentary and contested governance of citizenship in the europolity. 

Citizenship and Europeanisation are the central conceptual motifs, and each is studied from a relational and contextual perspective. The paper seeks to place the provisions of EU law relating to EU citizenship into a wider political and socioeconomic context. The cases of Brexit and enlargement are set alongside each other in order to demonstrate the central importance of EU citizenship, as an enabler of personal freedom, and also to highlight how the denial of EU citizenship can lead to individual strategies of avoidance, as affected persons seek to acquire other citizenships which provide the lost benefits. 

Professor Shaw will highlight the parallels between EU citizenship and national citizenship, both offering a promise of equality, but a reality of differentiation and inequality.

Professor Jo Shaw holds the Salvesen Chair of European Institutions at the University of Edinburgh, and holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2018–20) for research on citizenship regimes. Her teaching and research focuses on the field of the EU constitution and institutions, particularly in socio-legal and interdisciplinary perspective.