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When they migrate to another Member State (MS), EU citizens must adjust to a country whose legal environment is composed of both national laws and EU laws. Additionally, mobile EU citizens have their own legal culture which crafts the way they make sense of mundane circumstances and social interactions. What comes out of the mutual interplay between the host MS’s legal environment and mobile EU citizens’ legal culture? How does EU citizens’ legal culture emerge, and change, through their mundane interactions in the host MS? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 16 Italians who live in Sweden, this thesis tackles these questions from a socio-legal standpoint. In particular, this thesis suggests that Italians who live in Sweden interact in mundane circumstances using cultural schemas that derive from both their European legal culture and their Italian legal culture. Over time, they also internalize traits of Swedish legal culture that give them new cultural sources to use in their social interactions. By recursively using cultural schemas deriving from EU, Italian, and Swedish law, Italians who live in Sweden thus contribute to the material definition of the real meanings of these three laws. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to existing socio-legal scholarly debates surrounding legal consciousness and legal culture, with a particular focus on the EU context.

One of the greatest achievements of the EU is the freedom of movement between member states offering citizens equal rights in EU member states. EU enlargement and the COVID-19 pandemic allow for a critical test of whether EU citizens are indeed treated equally in practice. We test preferential treatment of EU citizens in two hypothetical choice experiments in Germany at two different time points: in the period before and during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Theories of responses to threat suggest that the COVID-19 crisis should increase discrimination against mobile EU citizens. While our findings reveal sizeable discrimination based on nationality and language proficiency of mobile EU citizens, the findings also suggest that, contrary to expectations, discrimination did not increase in the initial COVID-19 crisis period.

Democracy is one of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU). The starting point of democracy is that it represents ‘rule of the people’. But which people should be represented? In this report, particular focus is on the representation of ‘mobile EU citizens’ – the 14.3 million people of voting age holding the citizenship of one Member State and living and working in another. With a particular focus on supra- and sub-national elections, it first looks at the scope and enactment of Directives 93/109/EC (EP elections) and 94/80/EC (municipal elections) that in principle grant mobile EU citizens the right to vote on the same terms as national citizens of their countries of residence. Thereafter, based on the most comprehensive database hitherto, it examines the available information on registration and turnout rates amongst mobile EU voters in the most recent municipal elections and EP elections prior to 2019 in each Member State. Finally, it examines the available registration and turnout data of mobile EU voters in depth in a selection of key countries. Based on these three levels of analysis, conclusions are drawn about the representation of mobile EU, and policy suggestions are made based on them.