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This paper examines how the distribution of social goods within a political community relates to decisions on membership boundaries. The author challenges two renowned accounts of such a relation: firstly, Walzer’s account according to which decisions on membership boundaries necessarily precede decisions on distribution; secondly, Benhabib’s account, according to which membership boundaries can be called into question on the basis of universalist claims. Departing from both accounts, the author concludes that actual changes in the pool of participants in practices of creation and exchange of social goods pressure a political community to redefine its distributive patterns and, accordingly, the boundaries of its formal political membership. This claim will be supported by the analysis of threshold cases decided by the EU Court of Justice, in which EU citizenship is invoked with the atypical purpose of granting rights to a specific group of non-formal members. The reason for extending the protection provided by EU citizenship to these non-formal members is that they are already deeply embedded in practices of creation and exchange of social goods that concur to realise the distributive plan to which the EU is committed.

The article considers the role of the liberal public-private divide in protecting religious minorities against national-majoritarian assault. It links the defense of the public-private divide to liberal neutrality and argues that it rests on two distinct propositions: that the distinction between the ‘public sphere’ and the ‘private sphere’ is a meaningful way to cognise and structure modern pluralistic societies; and that there is a meaningful way to distinguish what is or ought to be ‘public’ from what is or ought to be ‘private’. While the latter proposition cannot be defended on grounds of liberal neutrality, the former proposition provides the institutional framework for conducting liberal politics by enabling the negotiation of the public and the private between national majorities and religious minorities as members of the same political community.