Passport Apartheid, Vaccination Passports and the Future of the Internal Market

Discussant:
Adriana Di Stefano
Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Class

ABSTRACT: Contemporary citizenship, which has travelled a long way from an instrument of justice and self-governance in the eyes of a 19th century observer to the key tool of global inequality and neo-feudal injustice is a form of apartheid glorified in political science textbooks. The EU, with the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality as its founding principle offered a real-life continental text-case of organizing societies differently. Weak Commission coupled with the general rise of fact-free nationalistic regulation contribute to the official and accepted destruction of the supranational success story. Pandemic scare playing the key role here is helping to turn the EU into something it was not designed to be: a grouping of mutually suspicious nationalisms relying on reciprocity and strict bilateralism in reinforcing the citizenship apartheid among unequal Europeans. Should post-pandemic world learn from this stance, the Union we have known is lost forever.