The Imagined European Community: Are Housewives European Citizens?

This chapter addresses a different challenge facing the EU: how citizenship is and should be defined in a ‘community’ which is primarily a market and in which non-market ties (political, cultural, social, national) are relatively less articulated. It argues that, notwithstanding broad phrases in the Treaty, access to ‘EU citizenship’ is in practice conditioned upon performance of paid work (housewives need not apply). Nevertheless, it contends that progressive possibilities remain in a ‘notion of a citizen imagined not only as a man but also as a woman’.

This chapter addresses a different challenge facing the EU: how citizenship is and should be defined in a ‘community’ which is primarily a market and in which non-market ties (political, cultural, social, national) are relatively less articulated. It argues that, notwithstanding broad phrases in the Treaty, access to ‘EU citizenship’ is in practice conditioned upon performance of paid work (housewives need not apply). Nevertheless, it contends that progressive possibilities remain in a ‘notion of a citizen imagined not only as a man but also as a woman’.