The History and Politics of Free Movement within the European Union

European Borders of Justice

Saila Heinikoski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350233065
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350150560
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The right to free movement is the one privilege that EU citizens value the most in the Union, but one that has also created much political controversy in recent years, as the debates preceding the 2016 Brexit referendum aptly illustrate. This book examines how European politicians have justified and criticized free movement from the commencement of the first Commission of the EU-25 in November 2004 to the Brexit referendum in June 2016. The analysis takes into account the discourses of Heads of State, Governments and Ministers of the Interior (or Home Secretaries) of six major European states: the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Romania. In addition to these national leaders, the speeches of European Commissioners responsible for free movement matters are also considered.

The book introduces a new conceptual framework for analysing practical reasoning in political discourses and applies it in the analysis of national free movement debates contextualised in respective migration histories. In addition to results related to political discourses, the study unearths wider problems related to free movement, including the diversified and variegated approaches towards different groups of movers as well as the exclusive attitudes apparent in both discourses and policies.

The History and Politics of Free Movement within the European Union is of interest to anyone studying national and European politics and ideologies, contemporary history, migration policies and political argumentation.

1

Introduction

La donna è mobile

Qual piuma al vento,

muta d’accento

e di pensiero

(Giuseppe Verdi, Rigoletto 1851)

1.1 Free movement: An endangered principle?

This study examines political discourses on free movement within the European Union from 2004 through mid-2016. While European politicians from across the continent hold a wide range of views with respect to the idea of free movement, the types of practical reasoning that they subscribe to seem to nonetheless follow a number of recognizable patterns. Through the analysis of free movement discourses in six major European countries – UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Romania – and in the European Commission,¹ this book seeks to make sense of these patterns. To do this, it will develop a conceptual framework of practical reasoning, theoretically applicable in many a field of politics and policy; practical reasoning refers to argumentation with which people seek to justify human practices, theirs and others’ (Kratochwil 1989: 37, cf. Searle 2001: 124). The primary aim of the book is thus to provide a broad, systematized overview of free movement perceptions in Europe from the perspective of high-level politics. The actual use of the conceptual framework and the comparison between the inherent differences of the analysed countries compose the two significant sub-aims of the analysis. Along the way, the study will say a great deal about the ways in which people across the continent understand ‘Europeanness’ and the process of European integration.

When I began working on this study in 2013, the utterances of British politicians on Eastern European migrants were what had originally awoken my interest. The inflow of large numbers of citizens from new member states under post-2004 conditions – the UK was one of the only countries, together with Ireland and Sweden, that granted free access for Central and Eastern European workers – seemed to be highly problematic for the country’s political leaders to justify. The unquestionable economic benefits of labour mobility failed to generate public support for the policy of free movement and assuage fears of ‘welfare tourism’, resulting in the British decision to leave the European Union.

When the right to free movement assumed a pivotal role in the British EU membership considerations overall, I became increasingly aware of the centrality of mobility for the entire process of European integration as well as of its moral and legal complexities. In addition to being a fundamental right (Roberts and Sakslin 2009), labour mobility is also an integral part of the single market (Rumford 2007); it relates to the Schengen Agreement and border control (Carrera et al. 2011); it involves concerns related to irregular migrants and the regularization amnesties of such migrants in member states (Finotelli and Arango 2011);² and it reflects approaches towards European cooperation in general (Kuhn 2015). This also meant that my original intention to limit my approach to mobility among EU citizens proved too narrow. Free movement closely relates to who is allowed to move freely in the European Union and who is not, and which political actors can ultimately make decisions in this respect. Indeed, free movement is a fundamental question of justice on several different levels.

In light of recent (2015–19) political developments, particularly terrorist attacks and the so-called migration crisis, the complexity and internal tensions of the question of free movement have become increasingly evident – and this certainly does not decrease the relevance of this study. The deaths from terrorism have made political leaders and scholars across the continent question whether open democracies can be protected when the idea and practice of free movement prevail (Council of the European Union 2016, Tammikko 2017). Nationalistic populist parties throughout Europe have exploited this new alleged security risk, apparently emanating from unchecked free movement. Even more importantly, migration from outside Europe has proved to be the issue that most severely challenges free movement and the rationale of European integration. Not only are the EU member states unable to implement common policies vis-à-vis migrants, but politicians across the continent face increasing difficulties in justifying why the citizens of ‘arbitrary’ European countries can live and work anywhere they want in Europe while others, ‘outsiders’, cannot. The reintroduction of border controls at certain internal borders highlights the lack of trust and worry about not knowing who crosses the borders. Although officially intended to maintain public order, such measures easily contribute to the alienation and presentation of people who are fleeing from war and conflict zones as potential threats. Another example of contradictions is the (unsuccessful) state-specific quotas for ‘sharing the burden’ of asylum seekers established by the European Council in autumn 2015, which require that the asylum seekers stay in the country designated to them³ – an idea that clearly undermines the free movement ideal (cf. Kmak 2015).

The migration context links the discussion on free movement in the European Union to the global framework of mobility. With conflicts persisting in the Middle East and North Africa, and population numbers increasing in the Global South, migration pressure on the Union seems unlikely to weaken. The question why Western ‘global insiders’ may move around pretty much as they wish, while the stateless ‘global outsiders’ tend to carry the label of illegal and ‘dangerous’ people, will remain pertinent. It is morally impossible to justify the proposition that people who are the worst-off need to carry the main burden of global structural failures and crises (see also Guild 2005: 14, Cetti 2012: 19). In many respects, this book provides an introduction to, and framework for, understanding this current state of affairs.

An important conceptual distinction should also be made here at the outset. In the EU discourse, ‘free movement’ in the European Union is consistently separated from ‘migration’, a term referring to migration from outside the European Union. However, since the mid-2000s, certain national politicians in Europe have started to refer to EU mobility with the term ‘(im)migration’, which has a more negative connotation than ‘freedom’ (see, e.g. Hansen 2008). This and other discursive implications in the political debates will be further elaborated in the present study.

This book began with a quotation from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. In the Duke of Mantua’s famous canzone entitled La donna è mobile, ‘mobile’ refers to fickle or flighty: the voice and thoughts of a woman are constantly and confusingly changing. In the Europe of today, ‘mobility’ is mainly discussed with regard to the EU’s free movement policies, but as this book will show, these policies also encompass the sense of mobility intended by Verdi: political attitudes are complex and contradictory, and no unified European voice can be found.

1.2 Filling a gap in mobility studies

To my knowledge, attitudes towards free movement in Europe have not been systematically studied through analysis of contemporary high-level political discourses. It is also difficult to find single-authored, comparative and Europe-wide studies on free movement discourses. The existing works often address free movement through various kinds of case studies or generally from the historical–legal viewpoint (e.g. Giubboni 2007, Johns 2013, Maas 2013, Recchi 2013, Tonkiss 2013a, Chatty 2015, McMahon 2015). My aim is to offer a diversified, multidimensional picture of the phenomenon without subscribing to a single theoretical orientation. The book illustrates, inter alia, that free movement in the EU involves more than just concerns of national security or the migrants’ rights, which are often the focus of mobility research (Sasse 2005, cf. Chatty 2015). In fact, the entire study could be seen as an effort to define or illustrate what free movement actually means in today’s Europe.

This book could be characterized as an analysis of mobility discourses at the high political level. In order to analyse practical reasoning through political discourses, it introduces a new conceptual framework and illustrates its usability in the European context. There is an underlying element of normativity in the analysis, which is why the study can also be classified under the umbrella of normative social science (see Section 1.3). However, my objective is not to evaluate what is morally the best approach for realizing the right to free movement but to show how free movement has been justified or criticized. Figure 1.1 illustrates some adjacent fields of study concerning mobility in the European Union; it should be noted, however, that there is considerable overlap between what I have categorized as different fields of study. In addition to being inspired by the debates, I wish to contribute to the debates with this book.

Figure 1.1 Studies on EU mobility (categorization by the author).

Many of the works that relate to free movement in the EU are thoroughly empirical studies; they have a sociologically inspired orientation, usually approaching the issue of free movement and European identity from the movers’ perspective. Ettore Recchi argues that although mobility plays a crucial role in the construction of Europe, it should be complemented with a true sense of solidarity and identity in order to create a unified Europe (Recchi 2013: 213, 2015). Theresa Kuhn develops several policy suggestions for developing such an identity: for example, less educated people should be provided with more opportunities for transnational activities, while highly educated people tend to be pro-European anyway (Kuhn 2015: 154–5). Adrian Favell focuses on the highly educated pioneers of European integration that he terms ‘Eurostars’ and concludes that they have been successful as pioneers, but mobility loses its distinctive value when it becomes more common (Favell 2008: 229–30). Brad K. Blitz has analysed immigration and free movement policies in case studies concerning different professional groups in five EU countries, noting that there are still barriers preventing EU nationals from utilizing their right to free movement. For example, national labour markets may discriminate against other EU nationals or make it more difficult for nationals to return to their home country (Blitz 2016: 14). This study also has an empirical orientation in the sense that the body of the work consists of a vast amount of empirical material. I also refer to the host of existing empirical studies while discussing the inferences I make.

A number of studies focusing on mobility discourses observe the host society’s political and public stances. These studies argue, for example, that free movement may increase nationalist rhetoric and tendencies, creating a situation that Katherine Tonkiss – focusing on the British approaches – calls a ‘post-national dilemma’ (Tonkiss 2013a: 98–100). Another focus of research has been the observation of how a certain group of movers is discussed in different host countries: for example, Simon McMahon argues that Romanian migrants have been positively received in Spain while they have been greeted with hostility...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The context: The history of free movement in Europe
• 3 Conceptual framework and methodology
• 4 Agreement dimension: Emphasis on common duties
• 5 Community dimension: Reproducing the community of the European Union
• 6 Utility dimension: Optimizing concrete benefits
• 7 Solidarity dimension: Solidarity as the ultimate aim
• 8 Setting the scene: Migration policy histories of the analysed countries
• 9 Free movement discourses by country
• 10 Free movement discourses as practical reasoning
• Appendix Material selection and speaker-specific tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page