Legal comparison and European law: or the paradigm shift from a territorial to a spatial viewpoint, in the prospect of an open and cohesive society based on European citizenship as model of plural and inclusive citizenship

The presentation is articulated in two distinct but strictly connected sections. The first one (§§ 1-2) focuses on the relationship between comparison based on national legal systems and European law as a major example of stateless law, a new kind of ius commune Europaeum, arguing how such relationship implies a paradigm shift in the conception of the law, consisting in passing from a territorial point of view to a spatial one. The following section (§ 3) highlights the importance of a new idea of citizenship, post-national, plural and inclusive, capable of completing the national citizenship, through its grafting directly with fundamental rights, precisely in the stateless form of the European citizenship, as the main parameter of that paradigm shift, in function of a political and social coexistence aimed at the building of a common European space, grounded on transnational democracy and solidarity, within which individual subjectivity, without necessarily disengaging from one’s own territory, thus understood as territory of national membership, or as residential territory in relation to a living and working condition in a local community, may become central to the overall objective of the formation of a Europe truly united through not only member states but also their peoples, and more generally the people as individuals seen in their relational dimension of civic coexistence at various levels, local, national and European.

Luigi Moccia, Legal comparison and European law: or the paradigm shift from a territorial to a spatial viewpoint, in the prospect of an open and cohesive society based on European citizenship as model of plural and inclusive citizenship in "CITTADINANZA EUROPEA (LA)" 2/2017, pp 27-39, DOI: 10.3280/CEU2017-002002