Written by Gilles Pittoors.
The European Parliament has a unique relationship with the European citizen. Early on, the Parliament laid claim to representing the European citizen, and used the notion of European citizenship as the foundation and legitimation of its actions and demands for reform. Indeed, the Parliament’s legitimacy largely depends on its claim to represent the European citizen in the EU’s transnational democracy, as opposed to the Council’s claim of representing the European states. It is from this perspective that, from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the Parliament sought to transform the more market-oriented view of European citizenship, dominant throughout the first decades of European integration, into a political one on which it could base its claims to representative power and legitimacy.
One important way in which it tried to do so was to propagate a particular discourse framing European citizens not only as transnational workers or consumers, but as European voters. Both the prospect and aftermath of the 1979 elections were crucial for crystallising the Parliament’s political view of European citizenship. The Parliament pushed for the understanding and recognition of European elections as critical moments turning citizens from private participants in a common market into public participants in a common political system. As a result, the debates in the run-up to the European Parliament’s first direct elections in 1979 paid much attention to the importance of citizens’ participation through their role as voters in European elections. However, the run-up to the 1984 elections saw a pragmatic shift in focus towards granting citizens political rights.
This briefing traces the origins and development of the idea of the European citizen as voter from the 1960s up to the second European elections in 1984. It shows how such discourse provided a basis for the Parliament’s claims regarding representation and its push for citizens’ political rights. Linking back to contemporary challenges, it shows that the Parliament has been crucial in keeping political citizenship on the agenda, and highlights how the connection with the citizen is critical for EU democracy.
Read the complete briefing on ‘The European Parliament and the European citizen as voter‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.
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