Open Access

The massive mobilization against the trade agreement ‘TTIP’ indicates that European politics is no longer only a matter of European elites. Instead, we see that citizens demand to be included in European decision-making processes. The ‘TTIP’ (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) stands paradigmatically for a much wider range of criticisms of EU politics that have been tackled during the protests. After providing evidence for this claim, the thesis investigates which citizenship is enacted in the Anti-TTIP-protests and how. A phenomenographic analysis of twenty-nine interviews with Anti-TTIP protestors outlines their protest experiences from the citizens’ perspective. The performance-oriented perspective allows us to reconstruct how, in processes of political subjectivation, political subjects as citizens emerge from acts of citizenship. The figure of the ‘Troublemaker’ stands for these active, responsible, and EU-critical voices that enact the power to influence European politics in their civic interests. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the conflictual politicization of the TTIP negotiations created a dense, transnational network of European civil society actors. This research provides an essential contribution to the field of citizenship studies and European studies by shedding light on the enactment of European citizenship and its potential to reshape understandings of European citizenship through contentious action.