THE TREATY OF LISBON AND EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP

In this article the author analyses the innovations in the Treaty of Lisbon, in particular the ones related to the status of European citizenship, i.e. European citizens. Accordingly, he points out the fact that many authors who investigate the significance and reach of the Treaty of Lisbon as a constitutional surrogate fail to see the important innovations related to consolidation and development of the concept of European citizenship. In the first part, the author sketches out the evolution of the European citizenship concept from the first founding treaties of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Community. He concludes that the Treaty on European Union and the constituting of the EU as a supranational political community sui generis marked the beginning of practical realization of the European citizenship concept. This was carried out primarily through policy-measures and pilot-programmes, and then the discussion on the European Constitution incited the shift to a higher level of affirmation of European citizenship. The problem of European citizenship as a political project of construction of an European demos encounters many difficulties and contradictions, and the Treaty of Lisbon links the realization of European citizenship with the spreading of democracy, which has been at the roots of the European integration process from the originally projected model of representative democracy to the model of participative and immediate (direct) democracy. For this reason, the "European citizens' initiative" is an important innovation which provides a new stimulus to the realization of the European citizenship concept. It remains uncertain, however, how firmly this political idea can be established if in some of the EU member-states citizens are still treated as nationals, i.e. if they do not participate in public affairs of their nation-state as much as they should participate even at the very top of the pyramid of a multi-level governance system such as the EU.