Perseus Academic: European Citizenship Practice by Antje Wiener

Although great efforts have been made to understand citizenship, it has remained a contested concept, largely because of the problem of the changing relationship between citizens and their community of membership or belonging. The European Union poses the most recent and dramatic change to this definition of citizenship. Arguing that citizenship must be explored from a perspective that takes this continual change into account, Antje Wiener develops the concept of citizenship practice — the process of policymaking and/or political participation which contributes to creating the terms of citizenship. The approach draws on both comparative social-historical literature on the state and the new historical institutionalism in European integration theories. European Citizenship Practice advances a discursive analysis of citizenship practice based on these related bodies of literature, which lie at the heart of this important contribution to citizenship studies.

Antje Wiener is assistant professor at the Institute for Political Science, University of Hannover, Germany.