From Legal to Lived Citizenship: Rethinking Political Participation in the European Union

Introduction

In the 1970s, the idea of a European legal citizenship was considered fundamental to defining a strong sense of common European identity (Brunazzo & Della Sala, 2019). It was seen as necessary to promote the idea of the “People of Europe,” sharing the same documents, symbols, culture, and currency, as an essential step toward overcoming the historical divisions that had led to the Second World War (Jamieson, 2002).

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which marked a historic turning point in the institutional structure of the European Union (Brunazzo & Della Sala, 2019), established the European Union Citizenship and included rights such as the right to vote in European elections, to obtain consular protection from other Member States when their own Member State’s representation is unavailable in the country where they are located, freedom of movement, and the right to work in any EU member state. These rights, primarily defined within an intellectual framework, were based on the idea that a common identity, established only through shared legal citizenship, is the foundation for creating a common economic space, which in turn would foster a new form of international cooperation and peace. 

But to what extent is European citizenship a “people’s project,” and how do processes of inclusion and exclusion, both legal and sociopolitical, shape participation in EU social and political life for both citizens and non-citizens?

In this work, I will introduce the concept of “Lived Citizenship” as opposed to “Legal Citizenship.” Lived Citizenship refers to the daily practices individuals engage in within their social contexts, which can be framed by a shared identity and oriented towards social change, even in the absence of a legal and state-recognized status. Specifically, I will explore how participation in the public European sphere through Lived Citizenship is influenced by factors such as socio-economic conditions and migrations. The goal of this study is to highlight significant situations within the social change context of the European Union that are obscured when using only the concept of Legal Citizenship, thereby arguing for the importance of including discussion of Lived Citizenship in the Anthropology of the European Union.

In this sense, what is most needed for an anthropology of the European Union is a framework that captures the lived, emotional, and performative dimensions of citizenship, rather than focusing solely on its legal form.

Conceptualizing the idea of the Lived Citizenship and methodology 

First, we must define the concept of Lived Citizenship. Then, we need to establish operational definitions that can be useful to identify empirical situations. 

Many authors have begun to question the supremacy of Legal Citizenship as the primary concept for defining individuals’ actual participation in their social and political communities. 

In Marshall’s work “Citizenship and Social Class” (1950), the legal status is defined as a definitive state membership with associated rights and duties, and this membership within nation-states provides a form of human equality against the inequality of the social class system. In other words, although there is no universal principle defining precise rights and duties in every specific context, the universal concept of legal citizenship is considered an essential tool in contemporary nation-states to promote social equality (Marshall, 1950). 

In the immediate period after World War II, this concept of citizenship made sense: with the rise of the western capitalistic system after the war, legal membership, with clear rights and duties, offered a dialogical platform for citizens in antagonism with the market and the social classes, fostering the definition of the welfare state (Marshall, 1950). This kind of thought defines an entire field in which the idea of a broader European citizenship in the context of a common market is considered a crucial goal for the integration of the member states.  

However, many authors have begun to question the idea that legal status alone is sufficient to guarantee equality and social participation. This reflection can also be extended to the European Union context. A person living in a member state without legal recognition can still engage in a less institutional form of citizenship, fighting for rights and social change. 

Conversely, a person with legal status may be recognized as a full citizen, yet still choose to avoid, refuse or be unable to participate in traditional legal and political channels, despite these being  their formal political rights.

That is why the concept of lived citizenship, through the idea of the “acts of citizenship” or the “missed acts of citizenship”, can provide deeper insights into new forms of activism within the broader context of the European Union, describing the idea of citizenship as a lived and embodied practice (Kallio & Wood, 2020). Whether or not individuals actively exercise their citizenship, they constantly negotiate (or sometimes withdraw) their rights, responsibilities, identities and sense of belonging through daily interactions and emotions (Ibid.). What makes this distinction from legal status crucial is that it draws attention to those who act as citizens without formal recognition, as well as to those who, despite having legal citizenship, find themselves unable or unwilling to enact it.

Before moving on, we need to clarify how the concept of a Lived Citizenship relates to institutions. Marshall (1950) describes legal citizenship as something linked to the national state that guarantees a set of rights and duties. The shift is from thinking of citizenship as a fixed set of rights and duties granted by national states to understanding it as a dynamic set of relational rights and duties, often formed beyond the geographical and interpersonal boundaries of a nation-state (Kallio et al., 2020). This is important in the European Union, where daily interactions across borders produce shared meanings and forms of belonging. 

Shared claims defined through lived citizenship experiences do not necessarily depend on formal rights, such as the freedom of movement. They can also take shape through everyday acts of participation that hold symbolic and social value. The ITHACA project, a Horizon 2020 initiative, is one example of this, having collected migration narratives from Europe and the Mediterranean regions. 

Although the project has officially terminated, its extensive digital archive remains online as a public resource. Through storytelling and shared experiences recorded during the project, the involved migrant communities opened new spaces for dialogue on racism and xenophobia in the EU. Many of these participants do not hold formal citizenship, yet their involvement represents meaningful “acts of citizenship” that continue to influence discourse through the project’s lasting online presence.

On the other hand, as previously mentioned, lived citizenship can also manifest as absence: people who possess legal citizenship but do not engage in such acts. These can be understood as “missed acts of citizenship.” What is also interesting is that “missed acts of citizenship” within the framework of “legal citizenship” sometimes translate into alternative forms of activism in the context of lived state membership, offering perspectives, for example, on the study of youth participation in social and political activities within the European Union (Deželan, 2023).

These examples allow us to define “acts of citizenship” as an operational concept. The concept seeks to understand the human being’s space of action as more closely linked to the broader concept of agency (Kallio et al., 2020). Kallio et al. identify four main dimensions to describe lived citizenship and acts of citizenship beyond the normative framework and within the concept of social agency. 

As mentioned before, the first dimension is the spatial dimension. The idea of a lived or performed citizenship challenges the primacy of the nation-state, encompassing both a downward rescaling, where the performance of citizenship is increasingly localized, and an upward rescaling beyond the nation-state through broader political allegiances such as the European Union (Kallio et al., 2020, p. 6). Since the focus here is the Anthropology of the European Union, the latter aspect is particularly relevant, although examining the influence of the EU on local forms of lived citizenship would also be valuable. 

Moreover, lived citizenship includes not only relationships with the state or other structural institutions (such as the family), but also everyday interactions. It is the “messiness of daily living” (Kallio et al., 2020, p. 7) that can provide insight into the complex intersections between public and private life, offering new interpretations of European politics, economics, and social issues. 

Another key dimension is the intersubjectivity of lived citizenship, which allows scholars to explore intergenerational and interpersonal sharing of symbols among the significant others (Kallio et al., 2020). This is relevant because lived citizenship is defined by the emotional relationships between those performing their status, rather than by the formal, jurisdictional relationship between citizens and political or social institutions. 

Finally, the remaining dimensions concern performed acts and the individual (not only relational) affective aspects of citizenship, which define spaces of care, emotions, and belonging, and open new empirical avenues for analyzing everyday practices of activism (Kallio et al., 2020). This is significant because emotions have traditionally been excluded from, or considered secondary in, academic analyses of citizenship. 

From an anthropological perspective, the lived citizenship, constructed by these four dimensions, is particularly valuable because it shifts attention from institutions to experiences and it allows researchers to explore how people negotiate belonging, rights, emotions and responsibilities in their everyday lives, or what we have called “messiness”, revealing how formal frameworks are interpreted, contested, ignored, or mediated in practice (Kallio et al., 2020). 

This approach highlights the emotional and relational dimensions of citizenship, in the forms of care, solidarity, and exclusion, that often escape legal definitions. By grounding the idea of European citizenship in situated and embodied practices, anthropology can uncover how “Europe” itself is produced and reimagined through lived encounters, rather than solely through institutional designs.

In the next two paragraphs, I will seek to answer the research question by providing two relevant examples. As I work in the organizations mentioned, the first example will draw primarily on my personal experience, using observational methods, and will be supported by a study of relevant literature. For the second example, I will mainly rely on relevant literature, considering my position as a young European citizen living the struggle described.

Lived Citizenship: acts of citizenship

Overall, an “act of citizenship” in the “lived citizenship” is the moment when, regardless of status and substance, individuals constitute themselves as citizens through actions aimed at promoting social change and gaining agency (Kallio et al., 2020). Keeping in mind this definition and the four dimensions discussed before, we can see how certain social experiences in the European Union gain anthropological relevance precisely through this concept. From an anthropological perspective, citizenship here is not a fixed legal category but a set of everyday practices and relations through which belonging, recognition, and agency are negotiated (Kallio et al., 2020).

The ITHACA project offers an illuminating case for this approach, showing how citizenship can be performed outside legal frameworks. ITHACA, that stands for “Interconnecting Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency”, is a project founded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and has the aim to “collects, preserves, and analyses migrations narratives in the Mediterranean region from the Middle Ages to the present day, within a rigorous historical framework”. 

Recognising that governments often fail to consider the real experiences of migrants when defining policies, the project aims to support migrants, especially those struggling with official recognition by host states in Europe or keeping their status, in empowering themselves and gaining agency, which frequently translates into political and social participation even without legal citizenship (Massari et al., 2023). 

Allowing migrants to share their stories not only through traditional qualitative interviews but also through public narration, defining that as an actual right to share their own stories with their own voice and as a duty to establish an empathetic relationship with policy makers and civil society towards social change, has enabled researchers to pursue the “biographical turn” in the social sciences (Gatta et al., 2024). This new approach, the “biographical turn”, generates policy recommendations rooted in the lived experiences and active participation of migrant communities, as it fosters relational and reciprocal outcomes that cannot emerge from a detached research alone. 

Importantly, the ITHACA project builds directly on an earlier local Italian initiative called DiMMi – Diari Multimediali Migranti (Migrant Multimedia Diaries), created in the small town of Pieve Santo Stefano. 

DiMMi focuses on collecting migrant life stories within Italy, while ITHACA expands that idea across the Mediterranean and European contexts, as part of an EU-funded research network. This scaling up shows how local storytelling practices and self-narration can evolve into broader social and policy engagement, even involving people without formal citizenship. 

For our analysis, scaling up matters: it marks a movement from small-scale, community-based forms of lived citizenship (like DiMMi) to a wider dimension (as in ITHACA), defining the strength of lived acts of citizenship from a local to an international level. It is important to note that the first migrants who shared their stories did not offer neat or well-structured accounts, nor did they always have a strong command of the language used in their narratives. Instead, it was this very messiness that introduced new ways of understanding migration policies and highlighted the importance of lived citizenship, showing how agency exists beyond formal legal recognition.

Through these acts of self-narration, they effectively perform lived citizenship, even though most of these autobiographies do not aim to advocate for specific policies or address racism through institutional channels. Instead, they convey personal experiences, such as journeys, fears, hopes and struggles, that bring forward an emotional understanding of belonging. This kind of storytelling is the one that opens an unexpected space for reflection in policymaking (ITHACA Project: Work Package 5, 2024). 

There’s also an intergenerational side to consider. These stories are designed to last; they become an archive of lived memory that contributes to collective knowledge and understanding (ITHACA Project, Work Package 3: Narratives on Migrations: Present, 2024). 

To illustrate this point, the ITHACA project takes up a key critique: many EU migration and anti-racism policies, built around the idea of legal citizenship, have in practice strengthened stereotypical images of migrants. As Andersson (2014) argues, these policies often produce what he calls a “border spectacle,” a form of political theatre in which citizenship becomes a tool for deciding who is allowed to cross. It might serve an administrative function, yet this spectacle turns migrants into figures of anxiety and exclusion, both in politics and in the media (Andersson, 2014).
In this performance of borders, illegality becomes highly visible, while the complex realities, humanitarian actions, and personal stories taking place there fade into the background (Andersson, 2014). The ITHACA project suggests that because these public narratives are so powerful, real change cannot come only from official policy frameworks, which sometimes, perhaps even unintentionally, end up reproducing the same stereotypes. Rather, it seems to emerge from below, through acts of storytelling, activism, and shared experience that reframe what it means to be a citizen without papers (Massari et al., 2023; Andersson, 2014).

Lived Citizenship: missed acts of citizenship

There is a rich body of literature on how “acts of citizenship” have become a key area of anthropological inquiry in Europe, in particular when people without legal status are involved in social or political change. What seems less examined, however, is the reverse situation: what happens when those who hold full citizenship rights decide, or feel unable to use them? This question is anthropologically important because it exposes the limits of thinking about citizenship purely as a legal condition.

During the ITHACA and DiMMi events I attended in September 2024, what I found particularly noteworthy was the presence of young migrants actively trying to reshape the spaces where they live, hoping to influence institutions and local policies. Yet, at the same time, many young European nationals appear to be stepping back from institutional participation, even though they fully possess the “state membership”. This paradox underscores how fragile the connection between formal status and genuine political engagement can be. 

Many young European people today face unstable social and economic conditions, temporary work, uncertain educational paths, and shifting family obligations. On top of this, constant movement across cities or countries for study and employment tends to fragment their attention and priorities. 

All of this makes participation in traditional politics, such as voting or formal volunteering, increasingly difficult (Tatar & Apatenau, 2019). In addition, conventional political institutions may feel distant or unresponsive to their needs and realities, leading many youths to seek alternative, flexible and less formal modes of political expression or engagement (Tatar and Apatenau, 2019). In Italy, for instance, only 9.1 % of people aged 15 and over engaged in voluntary activities in 2023, down from 12.6 % in 2013 (ISTAT, 2025). Even when rights exist, the capacity to act does not always translate into participation, and missing out on volunteering, for example, becomes another form of unacted citizenship. 

A study funded by the European Union found that “if we measure them using the methodological designs of most relevant international comparative studies, they have lower scores in almost all areas of political participation studied”, but also that political and social participation is a changing and dynamic phenomenon that cannot only be framed within institutional patterns (Deželan, 2023). 

That is the difference I want to emphasize between “Legal Citizenship” and “Lived Citizenship”: if we rely solely on the legal citizenship model, the Anthropology of the EU cannot fully understand the new and alternative ways in which young people in Europe engage in political and social participation. The so-called “missed acts of citizenship” within the legal citizenship framework do not exclude new forms of activism within the lived citizenship framework. The key question is: are young people truly disengaged from political participation, or is this interpretation biased by the predominant reliance on the legal citizenship model in academic research?

From an anthropological perspective, this highlights a growing disconnect between young people and conventional politics, rooted in deeper issues of exclusion, mistrust, and a search for alternative modes of political engagement (Malafaia, Neves, Menezes, 2021). Because social and political participation is a dynamic process often occurring beyond traditional political structures (Deželan, 2023), the concept of Lived Citizenship, through its four dimensions, offers a crucial framework for understanding this gap.

One key aspect concerns the way young people navigate multiple and sometimes overlapping layers of authority, many of which lack clear legitimacy, reshaping their ideas of space and national boundaries (Deželan, 2023). Within the European Union, this challenge has become particularly evident: young activists frequently encounter institutional ambiguity that cuts across both national and supranational levels. This situation creates a dynamic connected to the concept of “lived citizenship,” but in the opposite direction. Previously, we discussed how a local initiative could evolve into a European project because it addressed a shared issue. Now, the broader problem of European institutional and policymaking legitimacy is fostering a common activism that challenges the European Union. At the same time, these activists must also confront local institutions, as their actions still engage with national contexts.

In other words, the so-called “missed acts of citizenship” occur at both the European and national levels. However, this does not imply a rejection of European identity among young people, which contrasts with trends observed in the broader European population. Instead, their European identity is expressed through these “missed acts,” characterized by a rejection of participation in formal institutions alongside informal engagement in alternative forms of activism within the possibilities offered by lived citizenship.

To illustrate how the “missed acts of citizenship” among young people are still expressions of “lived citizenship” and forms of activism, I want to highlight a specific phenomenon. 

When viewed through the lens of “legal citizenship”, it might be dismissed as merely a “missed act of citizenship”, but within the framework of “lived citizenship,” it represents a legitimate performance of citizenship: the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” among youth. 

“Quiet quitting” refers to a trend observed among the younger European generation, where young workers “perform only those tasks that are formally part of one’s job description” and the main reason behind this phenomenon is the increasing importance placed on work-life balance (Olejniczak-Szuster, 2025). 

Although it does not involve any legal citizenship rights or dynamics and may even be viewed as contrary to a worker’s duties within the legal citizenship framework in some cases, it drives significant social change in terms of evolving values within European work culture. In this sense, it constitutes a performed act of lived citizenship. The phenomenon has a spatial European dimension (Olejniczak-Szuster, 2025) and necessarily includes interpersonal and emotional dimensions expressed through new attitudes toward the meaning of work in the European Union. 

Conclusion

The concept of Lived Citizenship is important for studying society in the European Union because of the social engagement of migrants through programs like DiMMi and ITHACA and the institutional disengagement of young Europeans. Conventional citizenship models offer important insights into structural dynamics because they place a strong emphasis on formal rights, legal status, and institutional membership. 

However, they often overlook the daily experiences and practices of citizenship, where individuals navigate complex emotions and capabilities in their lives (Kallio et al., 2020). Research on migrants has frequently concentrated on structural obstacles and official pathways, often considering legal recognition as the primary indicator of participation. This focus can sometimes eclipse the voices and narratives of migrants themselves, as well as their expressions of agency, which are vital for innovative policy solutions. 

Lived citizenship highlights everyday actions such as storytelling, self-narration, and grassroots activism, as demonstrated in DiMMi and further explored in ITHACA, showcasing significant political engagement even in the absence of formal status, or in the decline in traditional political participation among young Europeans, that does not imply a total disengagement. Instead, in the latter case, alternative forms of collective action, like “quiet quitting”, emerge using the Lived Citizenship paradigm, which may not align with conventional definitions yet still convey social and political agency.

Through the paradigm of the “lived citizenship”, emotions and alternative forms of activism become a relevant factor that drives social change and social agency, and the idea of “legal citizenship” systematically excludes this perspective. From this perspective, “Europe” is not merely an institutional or legal construct, but it is also continually shaped, challenged, and redefined through everyday interactions. For anthropology focused on the European Union, this indicates a need for an ethnographic approach that meticulously examines how citizenship is experienced, enacted, and emotionally navigated across various European contexts, rather than relying solely on legal or institutional analysis. 

References

Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. University of California Press;

Brunazzo, M., & Della Sala, V. (2019). La politica dell’Unione Europea. Mondadori Università;

Deželan, T. (2023). Young people’s participation in European democratic processes: How to improve and facilitate youth involvement. Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs, European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/745820/IPOL_STU(2023)745820_EN.pdf;

Gatta, G., Massari, M., & Miceli, S. (2024). Affectivity, embodied knowledge and reflexivity in creative biographical research on migration in the Mediterranean context. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2435442;

Gilbert, R., Widom, C. S., Browne, K., Fergusson, D., Webb, E., & Janson, S. (2009). Burden and consequences of child maltreatment in high-income countries. The Lancet, 373(9657), 68–81;

Istituto Nazionale di Statistica. (2025, September 12). Volunteering in Italy – Year 2023. ISTAT. https://www.istat.it/en/press-release/volunteering-in-italy-year-2023/;

ITHACA. (n.d.). Retrieved October 29, 2025, from https://ithacahorizon.eu/actionresults/#1646689927085-3eacbb86-a087;

ITHACA Project. (2024). Work Package 3: Narratives on migrations: Present. ITHACA. Retrieved October 29, 2025, from https://ithacahorizon.eu/actionresults/#1646688184069-8ad23264-0f3d;

Jamieson, L. (2002). Theorising identity, nationality and citizenship: Implications for European citizenship identity. Sociológia – Slovak Sociological Review, 34(6), 506–532;

Kallio, K. P., Wood, B. E., & Häkli, J. (2020). Lived citizenship: Conceptualising an emerging field. Citizenship Studies, 24(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2020.1739227;

Malafaia, C., Neves, T., & Menezes, I. (2021). The gap between youth and politics: Youngsters outside the regular school system assessing the conditions for be(com)ing political subjects. Young, 29(5), 437–455. https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308820987996;

Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and social class. Cambridge University Press;

Massari, M., Ingrascì, O., & Miceli, S. (2023). Policies on prevention of undocumented forms of migration across the Mediterranean Sea: A critical assessment (ITHACA Project). University of Milan. https://ithacahorizon.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/D5.1-Policy-Paper-on-prevention-of-undocumented-forms-of-migration.pdf;

Olejniczak-Szuster, K. (2025). Quiet quitting: Trend or temporary phenomenon in the labor market? Scientific Papers of Silesian University of Technology. Organization & Management / Zeszyty Naukowe Politechniki Śląskiej. Seria Organizacji i Zarządzanie, (222);

Tatar, M. I., & Apateanu, D. (2019). Multiple exclusions: Civic and political disengagement of vulnerable youth in the European Union. In K. M. Barth, M. Brie, D. Dărăbăneanu, & I. Polgár (Eds.), The role of intercultural communication in adapting ethnic groups to the European Union social space (pp. 477–505). LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-65599-5.