Euro-citizenship – the ideology of tomorrow?

Last week, I wrote about language and nationality, which unwillingly co-create my identity (I browsed the net the other day looking for some re-qualification options and I found the web pages of Czech Diplomatic Academy in Prague and I bumped into exclusion based on my citizenship. Maybe I should marry a Czech person if I want to live here. Do I? Concerning the academy in Slovakia, I couldn’t even find the web pages and then the ghost of google took mi to Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, which does not exclude anyone based on anything if you pay enough money. But then if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t want to be re-qualified!)
So that was a small introduction and a following on my job hunt and “identity hunt.

I was thinking that I would continue this week with my gender or sexual identity but I got interested in the issue of citizenship thanks to my dream of being a rich traveling diplomat. Citizenship is a privilege that connects, includes and gives rights but at the same time, it disconnects, excludes, and takes rights away. If we talk nationalism, then yes, we all need to protect our state, our people, society, culture, language etc. But I just have to smile writing this because I simply consider myself a postmodern human being, who does not realize borders and limits. I should be given rights by the EU, the same rights that are taken away from me by the state I am not a citizen of. I am an EU citizen and I would love to be proud of it. (Notice the conditional in the previous sentence.) I would love to be but I’m not because I don’t have the rights I want to have. I am for the big (so disputable) European Federation and I want influence Europe without having to live in the country I was born in. EU is about free movement of the capital and also of persons. And I think our older European-co-citizens are used to this – Spanish live in Germany, English in Spain and Germans in Italy. Why not live in a country you like best (because of the weather, people, services) if the Schengen treaty allows it? But I would like to have something more. I would like to influence the policy and politics of the state I live in and where I pay the taxes not depending on my state citizenship. I want that my EU citizenship assures me nearly the same rights and duties of the citizens of the state I live in. I say ‘nearly’ as I can’t be asking for all of them, of course (although I’d love to ;-)

In the post-communist countries, the politics is tightly and clearly connected to money (in the western countries, it is also from time to time connected to some morals and political decorum, but that is still sci-fi for us – literally). So if the premises are: politics is about money and if I am a part of the capital exchange, I should have the same rights in this “capitalist democracy” as the citizens of this country. Currently, I’ve been paying taxes to the state which excludes me and takes some rights and duties away from me. There are two options in my opinion: firstly, I could pay the taxes to the state I live and work in but then my EU citizenship would allow me to be part of the political system, hence I’d have similar rights and duties as the citizen of the state. The EU citizenship would be superior to my state citizenship. Secondly, I should be able to chose whom to pay taxes and so my state citizenship would be superior to my EU citizenship. But if this is so (and it IS), and I am able to influence the policy and politics of the state I am the citizen of, I should also be able to chose which state to pay taxes to. Obviously, this is not very objective but what is, right? The one thing I really love about the EU is that it discriminates all and that is why we are a little bit dissatisfied but on the other hand, we don’t envy anyone (the same method was pretty effective in the past regime).

All in all, I am for the SUPER-EURO-STATE, where all of us will be handicapped and we’ll have to pay immensely high taxes to afford that horrible bureaucratic creature in Brussels, but we will do it for one thing – to have the same privileges, rights and duties.

P.S.: So I’ll have to study the diplomatic academy in Brussels anyway.