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Like most of the previous respondents, I agree with Ferrera that the unequal division of the costs and benefits of free movement calls for action. My main criticism concerns his proposal to compensate non-mobile citizens. In my response, I shall expand on Christian Joppke’s critique of Ferrera’s presumption that ‘moving’ causes harm that ‘stayers’ should be indemnified for. I argue als that there is a real possibility that in its current form the EU cannot achieved the required social union. This would mean that due to the internal constitution of the EU, EU citizenship couldn’t fulfill its integrative functions. Given the enormous problems the EU is facing, we have to take this possibility very seriously.

Ferrera offers his proposal as a way of reconciling national citizens to the trans- and supra-national citizenship regime promoted by the EU. This chapter argues that his proposal is better seen as part of the EU’s inter-national regime, in which the national citizenship regimes of each of the member states are balanced against each other in order to adress the moral and functional challenges posed by interdependence in a globalising world.

The free movement-social citizenship dilemma is a political one and needs to be addressed in the political arena. By mobilising a politics of resentment among immobile citizens, populists have seized one of its horns and use it as a weapon against the EU. Those who want to strengthen the European Union and its citizenship should not commit the error to seize the other horn and appeal only to the minority of mobile Europeans. The answer to the EU citizenship dilemma must be to grab both of its horns and to risk a rough ride on the back of the bull.

Maurizio Ferrera’s policy proposals primarily address those Europeans who are already European-minded and self-select into transnational interactions and European engagement. I suggest addressing the Eurosceptics. On the one hand, if intra-European mobility fosters European identity, then we should provide incentives for stayers to overcome their reservations and move around rather than giving them a premium for staying at home. On the other hand, given the widening gap between mobile and immobile Europeans, the answer to Euroscepticism might not lie in promoting more mobility across European member states but in addressing the increasing socio-economic divided and opening up the resulting ‘echo chambers’ within countries. By trying to engage in a dialogue with Eurosceptic co-nationals Europhiles might be able to find better answers than by repeating the Europhile mantra.

The contribution deals with the ‘catalogue’ of suggestions Ferrera has made to make EU social citizenship more visible and salient. As widely acknowledged in the literature, social policy institutions have historically served key political functions for state and nation building purposes in Western countries, including in federal systems, where social citizenship has been used as an element to foster unity. Within the EU’s multi-level framework, the possibility to exploit the legitimating and credit claiming potential of supranational social programmes for polity-building and maintenance is undermined by two elements: on the one hand, the small size of the EU social budget and, on the other hand, the indirect way of functioning of supranational programmes that makes social Europe scarcely visible to citizens at the “last mile” of the implementation chain. This contribution addresses the latter issue, by discussing some initiatives going in the direction of empowering and making the stakes of European social citizenship more tangible, also for non-mobile EU citizens.

The postwar expansion of the national welfare state produced – as a by-product – a sense of national community on the basis of social citizenship rights. European integration, also taking shape over the period of postwar reconstruction, lacked the accompanying moral force of deepening European community integrity. More perversely, the operational logic of intensified market and currency integration from the 1980s on was intent to ensure that member states held their ‘wasteful’ welfare state in check through economic liberalization, monetarism and balanced budgets. The aftermath of Euro crisis (and Brexit) has exposed that the ‘permissive consensus’ of relegating social policy to the nation state and market and monetary discipline to the EU is past its prime. However, I doubt that adding substance to EU social citizenship is a viable strategy in times of resurgent nationalism. I am also not so sanguine that ‘adding stuff’ to EU citizenship would strengthen any sense of European community. Rather, I suggest a more assertive and transformative institutional role for the EU in backing and bolstering the problem-solving capacities of semi-sovereign national welfare states. The EU should transform its modus operandi from a ‘disciplining device’ to a ‘holding environment’ for national welfare states to prosper, making the EU a proud and tangible union of national welfare states.

Writing in 1959, Ortega y Gasset noted that ‘reality is not closed and reduced to the past and the present, but holds open the frontier of the future in which the real will be something that has yet to come into being.’ Ferrera and the other contributors in this forum have opened up a debate on the future of EU citizenship and argued for its ‘renovation’ in the light of rising Euroscepticism and nationalist centrifugalism in the member states. Ferrera shares Bauböck’s diagnosis that EU citizenship has not met its integrative potential. While renovation is not always innovation, Ferrera has laid down the path for innovative thinking about the (future) content of EU citizenship and for the introduction of ‘soft’ citizenship duties which would strengthen the ties that bind EU citizens. I am in favour of ‘soft’ as well as ‘hard’ EU citizenship duties and I argue here that EU citizenship is not, and cannot be, duty free.

European citizens are not yet members of a solidly political Union; they are still primarily members within a Union of states, where national interests are played off against each other. There is a fatal misframing of social conflicts along national rather than social cleavages. How can this misframing be broken up? A politicization of European issues is needed. In the long run, the future of EU citizenship will depend on how a multilayered governance system, such as the EU, will be able to balance the different levels of political participation, thereby accommodating principles of political equality, public control and influence on political decisions.

 At the heart of the current legitimacy crisis of the European Union lies the distrust of the stay-at-homes. There are three ways to address it: turning them all into movers; giving up free movement; developing a European Union that cares and protects.

This Forum debate has gone way beyond my expectations and hopes. I thought that commentators would mainly address my proposals on enhancing rights and introducing duties. The conversation has instead extended to my diagnosis as well, to the rationale which lies at the basis of my prescriptive ideas. By focusing on starting points, the forum has thus brought into light different perspectives and styles of reasoning around citizenship and even broader political questions. With hindsight, I should have spelled out more carefully my basic assumptions. But there is time to remedy this now – and not just for the sake of this particular discussion. I am in fact convinced that a closer and more systematic dialogue between empirical, normative, legal and social theorists would be a welcome and beneficial innovation, a way to contrast excessive disciplinary perspectivism and the related risks of analytical lock-ins.