Lightening of Citizenship and Its Implication for Social Policy : 'Social Security Lite' in the Making?

'Citizenship' has frequently been used as a key concept in Migration Studies. It has also become commonplace to feature the concept in Welfare State Studies, especially in these ten years. Marshallian linear evolutionary view of citizenship is, however, of little help in the analysis of current social policy development in Europe any more. What we are witnessing in Europe is the transformation of the meaning of 'citizenship'. In concrete, this paper builds on Christian Joppke's hypothesis on the 'lightening of citizenship'. My initial hunch is that lightening of citizenship would have a substantial impact on internal aspects of citizenship, namely what a state expects from its citizenry and what it guarantees in return. Taking recent social policy developments in Europe as an example, this paper contends that lightening of citizenship entails universalisation and lightening of social policy. In other words, the lightening of citizenship coincides with the lightening of social security. The paper highlights the roles of the EU institutions in this transformation. Especially, this paper features the effect of the leading role of the judiciary in the EU and contends that the judiciary-induced policy making affects the content of the policy. Substantially, we argue that the universalisation and lightening of social security corresponds to functional requirement of the internal market in the first place, but it is also a plausible answer to the increasingly diversified and de-stylised life career of its citizenry. In this regard, 'lightening' should be conceptually separated from mere 'retrenchment' of welfare or 'neo-liberalization'. This direction has been augmented by the intervention of the ECJ, whose judgements has built on the Union Citizenship and enhanced individual social rights protection. This trend may be called 'rights revolution' European style, but not without price. Featuring citizenship as a universal status, individual rights are protected, but collective ordering of social relations, which has been an important part of the social rights, would take a back seat. Therefore, the paper contends that a new perspective of "the individual versus the collective" is relevant in the analysis of EU social and employment policy