Abstract
Although the formal concept of European citizenship appeared for the first time in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the idea thereof goes back to the early years of the European construction.
The Treaty founding the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 instituted a "basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts" as stated in its preamble. More importantly, it ruled out discrimination between nationals of the different member states working in the Steel and Coal industries thus taking the first step towards the creation of a real European citizenship. Other significant progresses have been made ever since but always in an underlying manner and it is no earlier than 1992 that the expression "European citizenship" first appeared in a Treaty.
One shall however not be mistaken by the formal creation of this citizenship, and take it for definite and irremediable. As Willem Maas argues, the European citizenship is still dependent on the goodwill of member-states because it is "based on a political bargain among [them]" and therefore the whole process might collapse if disagreements arouse between states.For these reasons, one can wonder how this embryonic citizenship deals with the very structure of the European Union, which remains a patchwork of different states with different cultures, laws and conceptions of citizenship.
