EUROPEAN AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIPS

The course has as point of reference the economic, migratory and technological globalization, which represents a challenge to the classic individual rights connected to citizenship. The overall aim of the course is to ask what sense and content the term citizenship has outside a nationally-defined boundary and what relationships exist between nationally-defined citizenship and new transnational and global citizenships.
We will discuss the transformations of citizenship in a context of global migration and European integration. Firstly, we will introduce key theories of citizenship and will examine the shifting meaning and boundaries of citizenship from a conceptual angle. Traditionally citizenship has been understood as a bundle of rights and obligations for members of nation states, we will show how the transnational citizenship oblige to move from a state based perspective towards studying broader citizenship constellations with nested and partially overlapping boundaries of political communities.
The course will be divided into three parts. The first is dedicated to the interconnection, in the global world, between the different criteria of acquisition of citizenship (investigating the history of naturalization) and to understand what are and if there are international standards for naturalization laws, trying to explore the interrelation with global migration and constitutional identities.
A second part is dedicated to the specificity of European citizenship with respect to national citizenships (because it breaks the classical connection between nationality and citizenship). We will look at the rules for acquisition and loss of the citizenship as a legal status in EU member states and examine how nationally bounded citizenship is enriched through the addition of EU citizenship. We will try to answer to the following questions: Which “external effects” can European citizenship have, in the context of neighbourhood countries? Which are the consequences that the mutual opening of the EU states, their reciprocal commitment inside a common legal framework have had on the single national citizenships and on nationality laws? Given the absence of a coordination of states nationality laws, can this diversity affect EU citizenship and definitely impose its autonomy?
The third part is dedicated to techno-scientific progress and the challenges it represents for rights of citizens in Europe. It aims at showing which challenges technology innovation raises and which rights are affected by it, with a special attention the two regulatory frameworks existing in Europe: the Council of Europe and European Union. Aim of this part of the course is to foster a better awareness of the global challenges of technology innovation to individual rights as established by the systems of Council of Europe and European Union.