ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses possible sources for the sense of shared community that exists between European citizens as members of a cultural and political community. It examines the origins and characteristics of European citizenship and its impacts on membership and identification with the European Union (UN). Membership and identification are the building blocks of state diaspora policies and often comprise part of the extraterritorial outreach of a state. The chapter proposes the membership and identification as enabled by European citizenship. It deals with a discussion of the opportunities for membership and identification with the EU in the case of European emigrant communities. The processes involved in the making of the European citizen are as old as European integration itself, and its particular history is related to the development of the common internal market. European institutions introduced the term “European identity” together with “European values” early on during the integration process.
