What European Integration Does to Citizenship and Vice Versa: On the Autonomy of States and Individuals

European integration transforms Europe’s political order. With the Maastricht Treaty and the establishment of an explicit individual status of EU citizenship it became clear that the efforts of integrating states was also a process of integrating citizens by creating a European space for access to and use of individual rights. There is a sizeable literature on EU citizenship that has charted normative, political, and legal ramifications of such "citizenship beyond the nation-state". What has received little attention, however, is the ways in which the relationship between citizens and their states have been altered in terms of their autonomy – within the space of constitutional principles, legal rules and political decisions that EU and its institutions comprise of. In this paper, therefore, we ask what European integration does to citizenship but also what the creation of a new "citizenship space" means for the autonomy of states related to the EU. The paper does this by first probing the issue of what citizenship means in the context of regional organizations and supranational politics. In doing so we need to take into consideration that European integration does not only reconfigure member states’ citizenship; this also applies to closely affiliated states and notably the EEA-EFTA states Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. In line with that the paper proceeds to contrast two cases as illustrations of what EU integration does to citizenship: EU citizenship and what we call EEA citizenship. The juxtaposition of EU citizenship as full-fledged citizenship in European integration and EEA citizenship as structuring the special rights status of non-EU citizens of closely affiliated member states serves to highlight how citizenship statuses become fragmented and differentiated. The paper does this by distinguishing between state autonomy and individual autonomy. State autonomy is theorized as the relative ability of state institutions to shape society and to decide on the basic principles for the state and its community vis-à-vis other states and vis-à-vis international and supranational organizations. State autonomy presupposes that the state is the main granter of citizenship rights. That is no longer the case in Europe, given that individual autonomy is now determined by EU, ECHR and citizens’ home state. Individual autonomy is theorized as the ability of individuals to shape and influence their own life vis-à-vis other actors. This is a personal status that is constituted by a system of rights, with special emphasis on civil and political rights. The former relates to the citizen’s private autonomy against arbitrary uses of state power, while the latter relates to their public autonomy to access and influence processes of state decision-making. We assess the distinction between EU citizenship and EEA citizenship with reference to a) how much of an infringement on state autonomy each category is; b) how important the member – non-member distinction is based on this; and c) what the broader autonomy implications are. Do we see a general fragmentation of state and individual autonomy or what is the overarching picture that emerges from this analysis?