Strong Economic Rights, Weak Political Rights in the EU: A Constitutional Cacophony

Abstract

Brexit, the result on the referendum of June 2016 shook European politics and marked a crisis with constitutional implication for both United Kingdom and the EU. Without doubt, Brexit would have a severe impact on EU citizens who live and work in the UK. Likewise, Brexit will equally impact British who live and work in the EU. What is common among these two groups, beside the fact that both groups exercise their free movement rights, is that most of them did not have the right to participate in the referendum.

This asymmetry between economic and political rights in the EU was exemplified with the referendum on Brexit and marks a constitutional cacophony in the EU citizenship. Accordingly the aim of this article is to distil such constitutional cacophony by examining the free movement of workers from a political perspective and to argue the following: While free movement of workers makes sense from an economic perspective, politically it is imperfectly formulated. EU citizens who exercise their free movement rights on the one hand have limited rights to participate in the political life of the host country, and on the other hand, they might lose their political rights in the countries of their origin.

Such cacophony is caused by the lack of solidarity between member states that show a distrust over their own nationals who live in another EU country and over the national of other EU countries who live in their territories.

Keywords: constitutional cacophony, eu economic rights, eu political rights