Introduction: One of the main contributions of sociological approaches to the academic debates about the
European Union (EU) democratic deficit is to focus on the social acceptance of the EU.
Nowadays, EU institutions themselves seem to share the same focus on citizens’ subjective
perceptions. Indeed, fostering a sense of belonging to the EU becomes one of the strategies
to fix the EU democratic deficit and strengthen its legitimacy. For EU institutions, it is
necessary to bring the citizen closer to the EU as this would provide, at least partly, the
solution to the democratic deficit. Hence, sociological approaches should now widen their
focus, so to include the effects and adequacy of these EU policies among their research
objects.
Our paper aims at furthering sociological approaches by taking into account at the same time
citizens’ perceptions and European institutions’ policies engaging with these representations.
We argue that the vision of citizenship promoted by EU institutions through different policies
is very often reduced to its instrumental dimension
