Page 197 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Citizenship 183

The question of the extent to which citizenship of the European Union
may be described as post - national is not a simple one. Citizenship rights
remain clearly national in some respects. EU citizenship is granted only
to those who are nationals of member states and the decision about who
to include is made at the national level. Nation - states retain the power to
divide those who are resident in their territories into European citizens,
with all the freedoms of the Union, and non - citizens, who will not have
the automatic right to travel or work in other countries within Europe.
The link between nationality and citizenship is reproduced rather than
undermined in the current conception of European citizenship (Mitchell
and Russell, 1996 : 63). Furthermore, rights will continue to be assured
by nation - states, and the European Union has only limited power to make
member states comply with its rulings. The European Union has an inte-
grated legal system but, as Elizabeth Meehan (1997) has pointed out,
there is a plurality of legal instruments within the common legal order,
each of which works differently at different levels. The European
Parliament, Council, and Commission act jointly to make regulations
which are directly applicable in member states. However, most common
policies are not the object of regulations but of directives which “ direct ”
states to act to bring about a common objective expressed quite abstractly
and without detailed instructions. Directives are intended to allow diver-
gences in national procedures with respect to policy implementations,
resource allocations, and so on. Furthermore, new directions in policy
cannot be made without the consent of the Council of Ministers, an inter -
governmental body made up of representatives of member states rather
than a supranational institution. In some cases, states are permitted to
opt out of commonly agreed objectives on the basis of distinctive national
traditions. The UK, for example, is exempt from introducing workers ’
rights to consultation in the workplace. The rights of the citizens of the
European Union continue to be determined to a large extent, then, by the
nation - state within which they happen to reside (Meehan, 1997 ).
On the other hand, it is clear that in some respects the new citizenship
rights instituted by the Maastricht Treaty are post - national. They are,
however, post - national in two rather different ways. First, a number of
the rights ensured by the European Union are post - national in the sense
that they are universal human rights, attached to persons rather than to
citizens. For many years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been
guided by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order
to make its judgments. In most of the member states of Europe, the ECHR
is not only recognized as international law but is directly incorporated
into domestic law - making. The judgments of the ECJ are binding on