On the Construction of European Union Citizenship

The concept of comes into being as one of the important institutional innovations of the Treaty on the Union. It was not created overnight, but underwent a long and twisted process. This paper tries to analyze the historical process of its construction. In the 1970's, it was in the agenda of constructing a political Union and in the discourse on the identity that the embryonic notion of emerged. After the Fontainebleau Summit in the 1984, the ideas of were institutionalized in the framework of Internal Market. After heated debates and negotiations in the early 1990's, the notion of was finally codified in the Treaty on U-nion. The introduction of European citizenship into the EU Treaty is an inevitable result of political integration, and as an institutional framework, the accomplishment of the specific contents of EU also depends upon the future development of political integration.