European citizenship has been traditionally underestimated as an empty box and a bad copy of national citizenship, or, on the contrary, overestimated as a threat to national sovereignty.
The EUProact project aims at sharing and diffusing an approach to European citizenship overcoming these defecting visions and making it possible to observe Community citizenship as a social and political phenomenon that is carried on not only by public institutions, but also by citizens and a multiplicity of stakeholders. That is, an ongoing process of establishment and implementation of rights, construction of membership of the political community and participation of people to define values, rules and common aims.
We view European citizenship as the membership of citizens of the EU countries to a larger political "civic" community and of a polity operating as a multi-level and polycentric governance system, based on a set of rights established in the Treaties and increased over the years by the Community Acquis and citizenship practices, on a principle of multiple and difference-based identity, and on people participation both in the construction of representative institutions and in the intervention in public policy making on a daily basis.
The EUProact structure reflects this approach, focusing on citizenship as a institutional, social, political and cultural process as well as on matters that are usually not considered as part of the European citizenship Standard View: for example the single currency, the relation between citizens and public administrations, the corporate social responsibility. They are indeed some of the ways European citizenship is daily built, transformed and developed.
EUProact is addressed to scholars, experts, policy makers, civic leaders, people committed to public administration reform, managers of private companies engaged in sustainability and corporate citizenship policies, journalists. The purpose of the project is to put at these actors' disposal a repository of information, an observatory on what is going on and a place where exchange knowledge and opinions.
