Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

Citizenship or nationality as a legal relationship is always a public legal relationship. Such type of a legal relationship is, by its virtue, of an unequal character on the basis of the superiority of one legal subject and the inferiority of the other. 226 Thus, in this instance, between a Member State or the Union on the one hand and a natural person on the other. 3.2.2 Derivative Character of Emergence of Union Citizenship As has the normative theory of legal relationships been introduced and explained, it is more than worthwhile to approach its application to Union citizenship. Yet since citizenship of the Union as a public legal relationship emerges only derivatively from the Member State’s nationality through ius tractum , the first assessed through the prisms of this theory cannot be citizenship of the Union but must be the nationality of a Member State. The public legal relationship of the Member State’s nationality follows the same pattern and the same formula in its emergence as other legal relationships; hence, it emerges at the point of mutual intersection between the legal title and the legal fact. As may have the reader found above, the legal title is a legal norm which defines the circle of recipients of the legal norm, legally relevant circumstances of its utilisation, and a legal effect. For the purposes of the acquisition of the nationality of a Member State, the legal title is one of abovepresented iura . 227 Whether ius sanguinis , ius soli , ius familias , ius meriti or ius doni or any other; all these first demarcate the range of addressees, who is entitled to obtain the nationality, second specify under which circumstances an addressee is granted the nationality, and third enshrine the legal effect of the emergence. From the other side, there comes the legal fact — an anticipated legally relevant circumstance. Those relevant in this case are lawful legal acts and lawful legal events, which mirror how the Member State’s nationality is acquired. For the acquisition ex actu , 228 it is a lawful legal act as an individual legal act in the form of a constitutive decision, id est , a decision on granting nationality of a Member State issued by a public authority. Whilst for the acquisition ex lege , 229 a lawful legal event is the legal

226 Hans Kelsen, The Pure Theory of Law (translated by Max Knight, University of California Press 1970) 164. 227 See Chapter 3.1.1. General Scholarship on Nationality Law above.

228 See Chapter 3.1.1.2. Acquisition ex actu above. 229 See Chapter 3.1.1.1. Acquisition ex lege above.

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