ABSTRACT

The meanings and the practices of citizenship are changing owing to globalization processes and the birth of supranational political and economic organizations, such as the European Union (Sassen, 2006; Soysal, 1994). The concept of ‘disaggregated citizenship’ (Benhabib, 2002, 2005) seems to me to be the most effective epithet to describe a process that is characterized by associating all global citizens, for whom access to citizenship rights does not any more take place solely on the basis of their status of nationality, but also on the condition of residence and the entitlement to human rights, and thus from the perspective of subnational and supranational norms. At the same time we do not all enjoy the same set of rights. Legal distinctions concerning material and existential implications incumbent on people are produced by migratory policies and administrative practices (Rigo 2007). These distinctions engender a stratified access to citizenship (Morris 2002), affecting EU citizens, but also, notably, third-country nationals. The supranational, national and subnational organizations indeed define material and symbolic spaces and borders – through distinctions, separations and segmentations of rights – where different citizenship entitlements become attributed.