Citizenship, territory and COVID-19

COVID-19 presented a direct threat to free movement within the European Union, with travel restrictions and border controls being important parts of national responses to the virus. The EU law framework for these measures and their legality is addressed in passing. However, this con-tribution focuses mainly on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the emerging notion of terri-tory in Union citizenship legal studies and what the various responses - both Member State and Union - reveal about the state of territoriality and the interaction between Member State and Un-ion notions of territory. It is argued that the legal responses to COVID-19 paradoxically reaf-firmed the centrality of "hard' Member State territoriality and the "soft' nature of Union spatiali-ty and yet saw the emergence of certain features of EU territoriality and, separately, the Europe-anisation of national categories of belonging. What the COVID-19 crisis has revealed is that in the area of citizenship, Member States remain central as political–territorial units, yet at the same time this is layered by an emerging notion of EU territoriality.