Abstract

Chapter 6 analyses the ambiguous relation between rights and citizenship in the EU on the potential of EU citizenship to transform consumer rights into consumer citizenship. He holds the relationship between citizenship and rights in general as ambiguous: any concept of citizenship rests on rights, whereas rights do not necessarily constitute citizenship. The European Community has shaped rights for quite a long time. The treaties constitute rights of free movement and citizenship; the European Court of Justice (ECJ) extracted fundamental rights from member states’ shared traditions; and, through directives, a range of statutory rights have been crafted, for instance consumer rights and worker rights as well as other economic and social rights. As the European market developed, the traditional way of informal policy-making and insider networks in the EU no longer worked. Thus, more formal and legalistic rules proved to be an equivalent that helped maintain the growing market sphere.