Citizenship can be defined as “passive and active membership of individuals in a nation-state with certain universalistic rights and obligations at a specified level of equality” (Janoski, 1998:9). However, citizenship is not just a status (defined by a set of rights and obligations) but is also an identity since it expresses membership in a political community (Kymlicka,& Norman, 1994). Citizenship has also a substantive political dimension of active participation in the public sphere and in politics (Janoski, 1998). As Eder, & Giesen (2001:4) put it models of citizenship “can be subsumed under three major paradigms: the individualist paradigm which focuses on legal guarantees for the rational pursuit of individual interest, the political paradigm which puts forwards the ideal of participation of all in public debates, and the collective identity paradigm which links citizenship to a common culture or tradition”. In short, citizenship consists “of rights, duty, participation and identity” (Delanty, 2000:4). In this traditional conception of citizenship, collective identity and membership are linked together with the nation state and the national civil society (Delanty, 2000). Various processes of globalization as well as the European construction have undermined the sovereignty of the nation state and the question of citizenship has to be conceptualized within a “post-national” framework. At the same time, the rise of postmodernism, of identity politics and the “culturalization” of the social that these developments entail, as well as the “multiculturalization” of European societies under massive migration movements, put into question the homogeneity of a collective identity. Many groups - blacks, women, Aboriginal peoples, ethnic and religious minorities, gays and lesbians – despite possessing the rights of citizenship, express their feeling of exclusion from the common culture (Kymlicka,& Norman, 1994). This feeling of exclusion is not only due to their socioeconomic status but based on their socio-cultural identity, their “difference”. Cultural pluralists, such as Young (1990) advocate a conception of differentiated citizenship taking into account these differences. Cultural pluralists demand the politicization of the private as well as a pluralist view of the public domain (Delanty, 2000). More generally, these demands transform the terms of the universal and the particular as well as the definitions of the public and the private, two of the constitutive dimensions of civil society and citizenship (Seligman, 1992). In this context of a transformation of the terms of citizenship, this paper aims at exploring the hypothesis of the emergence of a new post-national model of citizenship linked to the European construction. Schematically, the argument goes as follow: the European Union’s practices and regulations concerning (i) policy-making within a multi-level governance framework contributes to the development and structuration of a post-national European civil society fostering active multi-level citizenship and (ii) anti-discrimination regulations and policies implemented at the EU level favor an alternative model to multiculturalism that allows addressing differences within the universal framework of rights.