ABSTRACT
Within western Europe the growing interest in the idea of citizenship over the past ten years is mainly the result of three political developments. First, the liberation of central-east Europe and German unification; second, the issue of European integration marked by the Maastricht Treaty, the Amsterdam Treaty, and, finally, the challenge of further enlargement of the EU and the increasing number of immigrants coming to Europe from different parts of the world. The accession negotiations with the central-east European countries, which started in 1998, show that the prospect of their membership in the European Union poses the most important challenge to the privileges and rights of Western societies acquired and preserved so far by the concept of European citizenship. This process exacerbates the conflict between the universalistic principles of constitutional democracies, on the one hand, and the particularistic claims of communities to preserve the integrity of their habitual ways of life, on the other (see Habermas 1994: 255-256).
