All nationals of European Union member states are Union citizens. While this might look like a little meaningful addition to the national citizenship, important rights descend from it. Among these probably the most important and cherished one is the right for all EU citizens to move and reside freely in all EU member states.But why is it important to be "economically active"? Because this right to move and reside freely across the European Union differs in conditions and scope for economically "active" and "inactive" citizens.To be economically active, in practice, means being employed or self-employed in order to prevent abuses and not become a burden on welfare and social assistance systems of the host country.There is considerable discretionality over what you need to do in order to be considered "economically active", which is in fact a good thing as a too strict definition with binding criteria might exclude honest people who do not want to become a burden but are nonetheless temporarily unable to work full-time, or are being trained without a salary.It is difficult in some situations to establish whether someone (more often than not, a woman) is an economically active citizen or falls in the less protected and less privileged status of economically inactive citizen. This may cause arbitrary dividing lines and discrimination in the distribution of rights and risks further marginalizing those who are already at the fringes of the labor market.
In this episode of "Words of Europe", researcher Rosalba Famà explains what measures were taken by the European Council and the European Commission to provide a much-needed stimulus for those European economies most heavily hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. These initiatives, known under the names "Recovery Plan" and "Next Generation EU", are unprecedented in several respects, and mark a significant shift in European policymaking.
In the first episode of Words of Europe, centered on the word solidarity, Maria Antonia Panascì traces the different meanings that the term has taken on in history from its origins in Roman law to the present day. In fact, the original legal meaning has come to embrace a more extensive concept of a political nature, whereby the idea of solidarity is at the basis of modern welfare systems. Over the centuries, the public duty to redistribute resources in an efficient and ethically sustainable manner has been added to the obligations between private individuals ("in solido"). Above the nation-states, a new level was then created, that of European law; but if, on the one hand, a consensus has not yet been reached on what solidarity actually means within the European framework, on the other it has already begun to transcend the traditional national dimensions rooted into a nineteenth-century concept of citizenship.