Quite often the point of decentralisation is to defend or extend social citizenship. As chapters in this book, and other works, have argued, that is to a large extent the case in the UK. And quite often the point of Europeanisation is said to be the same: to defend or extend social citizenship. The call of a European social model is a powerful one, and so is the call of a Europe of the regions. Put them together and the future for distinctive and extensive social citizenship rights looks bright.

But is it? This chapter asks what effects Europeanisation has on the citizenship rights of the people of the UK's different jurisdictions, focusing not on the thin thing that is European Union (EU) citizenship, but rather on the effects that the EU has on devolved and UK social citizenship. First, it makes the connection between devolution and Europeanisation, which are, between them, the two major developments in the territorial politics of the UK. What does their interaction suggest for the freedom of the UK's polities to develop their own social citizenship regimes, to maintain what they have, or to enhance it? The EU constrains more than it enables regions such as Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The ability of regions in Europe to be independent actors, developing distinctive new social policy arrangements, is limited. So it pays to study the EU's consequences on social citizenship in general.

What are those consequences? For all the important effects the EU has had on various rights (particularly for women), it has overwhelmingly focused on one right – the freedom of movement, whether for goods, services, capital or people. The effects are to regulate the conditions under which states make social rights real by regulating the bureaucracies and rules that provide the benefits.

This chapter concludes with a discussion of the scope that the development of the EU leaves for the development of distinctive social citizenship rights within parts of the UK, or for the UK as a whole. Overall, there is an upward shift of powers to the EU – directly, insofar as the EU regulates policy decisions, and indirectly, insofar as regional governments in the UK and most of the EU are weaker than the states that now once again vote on their policies.