Does European citizenship really deserve its name? The question undeniably presupposes a certain definition of citizenship. But in posing the issue in this manner does one, if only by way of intellectual convenience, accept the supposedly unsurpassable paradigm of the nation state? Not in the least: the approach adopted here —contrary to the reigning paradigms of contemporary theoretical analysis— entails above all taking into account the dimension of collective and political belonging located at the heart of any substantive citizenship experience. Above and beyond the symbolic contributions made by the treaty of Maastricht, European citizenship, as defined by the official language of the Union, remains primarily a legal creation of the Court of Justice, characterised above all else by the intention to construct a continent-wide transnational market. Free from any and all governmental restrictions, guaranteeing the free movement of people, and forbidding all discrimination against EU citizens on the basis of nationality, this market is based on a notion of the individual as economic actor. Despite all prior efforts to fortify the political and social components of the European project, this market-based dogma has proven itself to be remarkably resilient, even successfully overtaking what is referred to as the social dimension to European citizenship, which was nonetheless initially intended as a necessary counterweight to market integration. From this fact spring contradictions that are legally unjustified, politically indefensible, and socially calamitous. Despite the wholly unintended nature of these consequences, the apparatus of the European Union and its judicial mechanisms have nonetheless managed to pit national systems of production against the social welfare apparatus of member states by destabilising sensitive historical compromises grounded in the most legitimate of democratic procedures. Given the constraints inherent to it, European citizenship could perhaps not have come into being by any other means than via such depoliticized and unilateral measures. But can one justifiably label as citizenship the results of a process which, at no moment, takes into account the collective repercussions of its actions? Must we wait for European citizenship to reveal itself bit by bit, almost by accident, to its putative beneficiaries, as though operating on the principle of an emergent effect? What can legitimately be expected of a form of citizenship squeezed in the vice of a negative Europeanisation, forever confined to the functionalist mould in which it was conceived? Is the failure of European citizenship truly attributable to its member states alone, which are easily accused of having systematically opposed all forms of positive integration? Is this failure not, quite simply, the price of its own contradictions?