A citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. This broad definition is discernible, with minor variations, in the works of contemporary authors as well as in the entry “citoyen” in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie..

The purpose of this article is to discuss the type of attachment and allegiance propounded in the recently proclaimed Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Charters such as Bills of Rights are generally held to be reflective of and evocative of a rights-based constitutional patriotism. The EU is not a state; there are widely different conceptions of what it is and should be, one of which is the vision of a Europe of nation states. Is the spirit of (...) the Charter thus instead that of deep diversity, i.e. reflective of a wide diversity of views, visions and values as to what the EU is and ought to be? The article contrasts constitutional patriotism and deep diversity as alternative underlying philosophies of the Charter and also briefly examines the Charter's presumed ability to produce either type of sentiment of allegiance. (shrink)

This article examines the political challenges of the European Union. It explains that political theorists and scientists alike have viewed European integration as a laboratory for exploring how far the nation state, and the forms of domestic and international politics to which it gave rise, has been affected by the various processes associated with globalization. It discusses the Charter of Rights and Constitutional Treaty of the EU and suggests that the EU can be plausibly characterized as an intergovernmental organization of (...) an advanced kind, a nascent federation of states, and a new form of post-national and post-state entity. (shrink)