Our project

BEUcitizen: barriers to EU-citizenship

Exercising EU Citizenship about rights, duties and possible barriers to their realisation by European Citizens.

Twenty years after the EU introduced the concept of ‘European Citizenship’ in the Treaty of Maastricht, the European Commission proclaimed 2013 the ‘Year of European Citizenship’. This was done to draw additional attention to a perceived problem: why don’t Europeans realise their rights as European citizens? With the term ‘realise’ here being used to mean both being aware of these rights and demanding, using and thereby materialising them. This year, the European Commission also awarded a consortium of 26 institutes from 19 countries in and outside Europe, coordinated by Utrecht University, a major research grant to carry out a 4-year research project to study this problem.
They are:

This multinational and multidisciplinary project entitled bEUcitizen, sets out to identify and analyse which impediments hinder European citizens from realising these rights and why.