Op-Ed: “EU citizenship and Covid-19: a crisis of citizenship?!” by Sandra Mantu

For those of us for whom home is split between EU countries, COVID-19 made us re-evaluate our relationships with the states to which we legally, socially, emotionally and economically belong. This is partly linked to the travel restrictions that have been introduced by several EU states, jeopardising the most well-known and most appreciated right of EU citizenship: the right to freedom of movement. In a book that I co-edited and that was published at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, various authors examine how EU citizenship reconstructs in unexpected ways what citizenship as a status means and stands for. The book seeks to capture the tensions that result from the nature of EU citizenship itself – neither a citizenship status similar t