ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical overview of the rapid rise and equally sudden decline of the normative ideal of European citizenship as a status of transnational social integration. The Court of Justice's case law played a decisive role during the founding phase of the constitutionalisation of the Community legal order, especially in relation to the freedom of movement and social rights of migrant workers. An outcome of social integration in the migrant's elected country of residence – extended to all persons whose contribution to the internal market is actually only potential or at the very best only indirect – had thus been already firmly secured by the court's historical case law on the freedom of movement of workers and their families. In Alimanovic, indeed, the court denied two Swedish citizens, who had very recently come back to Germany, where they had lived and worked briefly in the past, special non-contributory benefits such as subsistence allowances for long-term unemployed people.
