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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
The Origins of EU Citizenship (1950–1980)
Introduction
Although it would take until the early 1970s before any real explicit discussion concerning a European Community citizenship was to emerge (Wiener 1998: 10–11), a very tangible, what we could term, supranational citizenship regime had been set to develop from the onset of European integration in the 1950s (see Meehan 1993). Certainly, this supra- and transnational citizenship regime was rarely perceived as such at the time. That is to say, in sharp contrast to the EU citizenship’s current image and formal status, the historical citizenship regime did not constitute a free-standing policy area but was inextricably bound up with migration policy. Hence, the emerging catalogue of transnational rights in the Community was almost exclusively conferred on one single target group, namely intra-Community labor migrants, and so derived from the EU’s migration policy regime (Koslowski 1998) that the Rome Treaty instituted in order to stimulate labor migration between the Community’s six member states. Elements of citizenship policy and migration policy were thus directly bound up with the political economic scheme devised by the Rome Treaty and the Community’s four freedoms: the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital. From the very beginning, then, migration policy at the EU level also implied a transnational citizenship policy at the EU level. In this chapter we shall remove the dust from this important historical relationship, one that often gets lost in today’s debate and scholarship on EU citizenship.
The common neglect of the historical symbiosis between supranational migration and citizenship policy owes much to the fact that contemporary scholarship tends to perceive of migration as a latecomer on the EU agenda. In Encyclopedia of the European Union (Dinan 2000: 269), for instance, where a number of scholars account for the EU’s historical trajectory, it is established that “[i]mmigration emerged as an explicit European level policy area only in the [Maastricht] Treaty on European Union,” which was ratified in 1993.1 According to this prevalent view, such tardiness is mainly attributable to the alleged fact that member states until the 1990s considered the area of migration to be wholly off-limits to any supranational competence and meddling. Migration, the story goes, was, and still is, simply too delicate of a matter for national governments to compromise, too intimately bound up with matters of borders, security, citizenship, national identity, and a host of other purportedly “sensitive” issues which are said to define the very essence of the sovereign nation-state. And although it is acknowledged that the Amsterdam Treaty (ratified in 1999) did, in fact, bring about a certain transfer of migration policy competence from the national to the supranational level, the (what we could call) sensitivity thesis stays in control and can readily claim corroboration with reference to the, after all, quite limited relocation of competence to the supranational level that has taken place in recent years. Hence, member-state governments can still be said to be to “jealously guarding” their sovereignty over migration policy vis-à-vis the EU level.
There is certainly an element of truth in this account; but it is also an account that significantly overstates and (inadvertently) misrepresents its case. Upon closer scrutiny it soon becomes obvious that the story largely earns its coherence from an erasure of the longstanding supranational migration policy of “free movement” within the EU for member state citizens. These days, free movement is thus rarely conceptualized in terms of migration and so is exempted from discussions of the larger migration policy complex in the European Union, past and present (see further Hansen 2008: Ch. 1).
This way of defining away the positively charged phenomenon of free movement—connoting, as it does, open borders and labor markets, European unity, modern economy, and, last but not least, European citizenship—from the context of migration, which in today’s political vocabulary mostly spells “problems,” is, needless to say, an even more firmly established, albeit much more premeditated, practice within the sphere of European politics and policy making. As such, it walks hand in hand with an established and steadily growing discrepancy in the way people who move across national borders are treated and represented in and by the European Union. Although referring specifically to this discrepancy’s manifestation in the Spanish case, Gunther Dietz and Belén Agrela’s (2004: 431) delineation loses none of its accuracy when applied to the situation in the EU as a whole:
The large segment of intra-European Union migrants is made statistically and politically invisible by virtue of its being excluded from official immigration data, from the discourse on migration, and from governmental integration measures. . . . Thus immigration is officially—and artificially—perceived and treated as a south-north phenomenon. The formal and legal classifications of migrants—refugees or asylum seekers, settled or temporary immigrant workers, undocumented immigrants, and so on—are combined with ethnocultural and symbolic labels that reflect an implicit ethno-religious hierarchy of “others.”
Notwithstanding the reality of national borders within the EU having been open to labor migration for member-state citizens ever since the start of European integration, and regardless of the fact that member states handed over the responsibility for such migration policy to the supranational level, today’s literature, save for a few notable exceptions (e.g. Miles 1993; Geddes 2003), persists in designating migration policy as a latecomer on the EU agenda. As Sassen (1999: 129) put in 1999: “there is still no EC immigration policy as such, nor a EC citizenship policy.” In this literature, migration policy in the EU is thus almost exclusively made to refer either to member states’ individual immigration, asylum, and migrant integration policies with regard to people from outside the Union and the OECD sphere, or to the intergovernmental cooperation on migration in the EU (e.g. Schengen). This provided, it is only when this latter and more comprehensive dimension of migration policy formally enters the supranational policy picture in the 1990s that scholars in any general sense start to perceive of a relationship between migration policy and citizenship policy at the EU level. Prior to the 1990s, current scholarship rarely detects such a relationship; it only catches one between free movement and EU citizenship.
Interestingly enough, this approach has not always been predominant. As will be evinced below, up until the late 1970s, even into the 1980s, the literature quite commonly referred to free movement as a form of migration policy and those who utilized free movement as migrants or “immigrants” (see e.g. Collins 1975). Even more so this held true for the terminology employed by EU institutions. Such historical changes of definitions and categorizations (as well as the disappearance of categorizations and inventions of new ones) of people who migrate function as telling indicators of the impact European integration has had on institutionalized and public perceptions of identity, belonging, and spatial frames of reference. In parallel with the politically driven process and project of European integration, the definitions and categories employed to describe this process are also transformed. In turn, this parallel change of signification often entails that the consequences of European integration are endorsed and made imperceptible at one fell swoop. Not too long ago, people in Sweden with Italian origin were routinely described as “immigrants.” Nowadays, this connection is rarely made in the public debate and official policy. The designation of people with Spanish origin in France, Portuguese in Belgium, or Irish in Britain point to similar cases of changing categorizations (see Miles 1993: 206–7).
Against this background, we now go on to survey and analyze the EU-level’s approach to migration, citizenship, and transnational rights during the first decades of European integration (ca. 1950–1980). As we have already demonstrated, such an account cannot confine itself to the nexus of migration and citizenship as it played out in the context of free movement. Instead, the chapter explains why the supranational influence was limited to the migration policy of free movement, whereas the member states effectively kept control over all other areas of migration policy. As part of this, member-state governments made sure to exclude third-country nationals (TCNs)—the great majority of whom had been recruited as labor migrants or “guest workers”—from free movement and the rights belonging to it. This provided, it becomes important to account for the consequences of this division, or dualization, of migration policy in the EU, not least since this dualized order still exists today, manifesting in an unequal treatment between migrants with citizenship in a member state and TCNs. This means that the chapter seeks to weave together the question of EU citizenship historically not only with the migration policy of free movement; rather, the complex historical trajectory of EU citizenship compels us to also locate it in the context of migration policy writ large. That there is ample reason for such a pursuit will, not least, become evident as we account for the European Commission’s attempts in the 1970s to utilize Community citizenship and social rights as an articulatory platform to confer rights on external migrants and TCNs and thus remedy their lot in the Community as a whole. Such calls to expand a transnational regime of rights, or citizenship, also formed an integral part of the larger struggle over the political economic orientation of the European Community in the 1970s. Citizenship was thus to surface as a watchword in the debate over European integration’s role in the looming economic crisis in Western Europe during the 1970s. Conversely, the provision of substantial supranational rights of citizenship was also seen as a means to amend the legitimacy crisis hitting the project of European integration itself at this historical juncture.
Regimes of EU Citizenship and Intra-EU Migration
In the Treaty of Rome, labor migration was assigned an important function. This partly grew out of the assessments made in The Brussels Report on the General Common Market from 1956—or the Spaak Report, named after the Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak, who was its author and principal instigator. The report, which made up the chief preparatory work for the Rome Treaty and the design of the European Economic Community (EEC), made it clear that labor migration formed part of the EEC’s elementary logic, a necessary precondition for an association built on “free competition” (Maas 2005: 1019). A large market and competitive production, it was argued, did not only require facilitated mobility for the interchange of goods, capital, and services; it also required access to a mobile labor force. Imbalances on the Community’s labor market such as when one member state was unable to supply its growth industries with enough labor, or labor with sufficient skills, would in this way be resolved by having the member state in need gain access to labor from the other members. In theory, the allocation gains reaped from enhanced labor mobility also implied that unemployment in one region of the Community and labor shortage in another were to balance each other out in a way beneficial to both regions. The mobility of the factors of production (in this case labor) in the six member states was no longer to be constrained by national borders; instead, it was to be extended in order to benefit the entire transnational common market and enlarged production base that the integration project intended to create. Important to keep in mind, though, is that this by no means entailed a transfer of national labor market and migration policies to the supranational level. However, since migration policy as regarded the intra-EEC movement of workers was subjected to such a transfer, this change did, indirectly, involve a certain supranational influence on labor market policy. But this was as far as the member states were ready to go at this point (Romero 1993).
The Rome Treaty’s labor mobility provisions originated in the Treaty of Paris (1951) and its institution of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (Maas 2005). Through persistent pressure from the Italian government, the ECSC opened up for the free movement of qualified coal and steelworkers. Italy saw itself suffering from an acute problem of overpopulation and was, therefore, very anxious to secure means for emigration in order to, as the expression often goes, export its surplus population, and, with it, its unemployment problem. This also constituted one of the main reasons behind the Italian support for and participation in postwar European integration (Willis 1971).
Italian unemployment problems also influenced the Rome Treaty’s institution of free movement for labor. This time, however, the other five signatories were also in favor of more open intra-EEC labor migration. But for them, and in contrast to Italy, it was labor shortage, rather than unemployment, that prompted their approval. The five other members, and West Germany in particular—now the emerging economic motor of Western Europe—had difficulties in meeting the 1950’s great labor demand on their own, and thus saw free movement of labor as a means to amend the problem (Collins 1975: 13). The motives are clearly mirrored in the migration statistics for the years immediately following the ratification of the Treaty of Rome, where Italian workers made up over half of all labor migrants admitted in the Community countries, while less than two fifths came from countries outside of the EEC. In the beginning of the 1960s, almost half of West Germany’s labor migrants came from Italy (Ascoli 1985: 186–7).
Free movement of labor within the EEC was not introduced over night at the ratification of the Treaty of Rome in 1958, but would be gradually implemented during the 1960s. More precisely, free movement meant that citizens in the member states were given the same rights and opportunities to seek and acquire work in the Community as a whole. Citizens in one member state were entitled to travel to another member state to accept an employment offer; and they were entitled to stay on in that country after the employment had been concluded. Exceptions were made for employment in the civil service, e.g., the police, military, taxation authorities, government, and the court system. Over and above that, member states were also permitted to restrict the free movement in cases where it was judged to compromise law and order, public safety, and health (see Weiss and Wooldridge 2002).
The work to implement the free movement was carried out in different stages during the 1960s and was completed (tentatively) through legislative decision by the Council of Ministers in 1968 (Council EC 1968a, 1968b). This took place at the same time as the Customs Union was completed, which also had been gradually implemented. 1968 thus marks an important date in EU history; two of the Treaty of Rome’s most important transitional goals were now completed. The work to develop, expand, and improve the rights tied to free movement did not stop in 1968, however, but was to continue during the 1970s, and has done so ever since. Hence, even today free movement is not fully accomplished. In fact, the introduction of the so-called transition rules that all old member states (except for Sweden2) imposed on the ten new members in 2004 and the two new ones in 2007, and which substantially limit the right of free labor movement for the new EU citizens, inflicted a major blow to free movement, both as a principle and practice. But also citizens of the old member states are still met by certain obstacles when they move, work and settle across borders within the EU (see Baldoni 2003). Even if one disregards the transition arrangements, then, free movement—in the sense of denoting the total equality of rights (and thus the total absence of discrimination based on nationality) between the intra-EU migrants and the citizens of the member state to which they migrate—is still not fully implemented, but even now subjected to some restrictions. The phasing out of such lingering restrictions, as we will discuss further in the next chapter, has been one of the primary aims of the EU’s formal citizenship regime ever since its inception in the early 1990s.
Returning to the historical development, it is important to remember that the implementation and development of the free movement provisions implied so much more than a catalogue of formal rights and prohibitions against one member state’s labor market discriminating against another member’s citizens on grounds of nationality. In order to stimulate transnational labor mobility and create incentives for labor to work across borders in the Community, it also became necessary to ensure that such migration entailed a set of substantial rights. As we shall see below, the labor migration occurring within the regime of free movement was therefore also to become equipped with an accentuated social welfare dimension.
Migration Policy as Transnational Social Citizenship
When we speak of the EU’s social and welfare policy it must be kept in mind that, from the very outset, such EU policy has differed markedly from its national counterparts in the member states. EU competence within social policy was, and still is, very limited and has for the most part consisted of general policy statements lacking binding legal force (see Hix 1999: 226–30). The Treaty of Rome, for instance, emphasized the importance to work for improved living standards and working conditions, increased employment, and reduced social disparities in the Community. The treaty also assigned the Commission the task of establishing member-state cooperation on social policy. As the generality and vagueness of these objectives indicate, EU social policy was never intended to replace its national counterpart; neither can it easily be described as a complement to national social policy, even if this constituted one of its stated purposes. Instead, it was foremost put in place to complement the EU’s own economic, or “market making,” policy. And since the Community’s supranational bearing on economic policy centred on measures to enhance factor mobility, this meant that Community social policy came to be primarily directed toward stimulating labor migration between the member states (see Flanagan 1993: 168–9). EU social policy, as the European Parliament (2000) has described it, was thus fashioned “as an adjunct to economic policy and remained broadly speaking an accompanying policy. The only practical achievements recorded between 1958 and 1974 were the implementation of freedom of movement for migrant workers and the associated social security arrangements and the establishment of the European Social Fund.” The intimate connection between the Community’s social policy and the free movement’s migration policy was also made apparent by the fact that the Rome Treaty’s binding and most important social policy provisions were incorporated into the section on the free movement of labor, capital, and service—and not in the treaty’s section on social policy (see Majone 1993).
This provided, from the late 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s Community initiatives within the social policy area were almost exclusively geared toward free movement and the issue of intra-Community labor migration (Dinan 1999: 421; Williams 1994: 182). In large part, therefore, it was the implementation and development of social rights for internal labor migrants that came to define supranational social policy during the Community’s first decades.
This should not lead one to interpret the role of Community social policy solely in mechanistic terms, as if social policy only functioned as a crass handmaiden to economic imperatives calling for greater cross-national labor mobility. While this certainly was an important part of the story, the European Commission also aspired to provide Community social policy with a stronger and more wide-ranging mandate, one that would also encompass redistributory instruments and thus go beyond the confines of compensatory measures targeted at internal migrant workers and their families. In the 1960s, for instance, the Commission endeavored to set in train a gradual harmonization of national social policy, arguing for an elevation of social policy standards and living and working conditions across the Community. For this purpose the Commission established a close collaboration with national trade unions, a move that greatly incensed both governments and employers’ associations. This, not the least, since unions soon tried to make use of the platform afforded to them by the Commission for the purpose of reaping domestic social and political gains (Meehan 1993: 68–9). Toward the latter part of the 1960s, this undertaking on the part of unions led to charges from governments that “the Commission was using trade unions as pressure groups against them” in order to infringe upon the national control over social policy-making (Meehan 1993: 69). As a consequence, it was not long before governments resorted to reprisals against the Commission, deciding to greatly limit its power of initiative in social affairs as well as imposing restrictions on its collaboration with organized labor (Meehan 1993: 69–70).
If this modifies the mechanistic, or purely “economistic” interpretation, it also points to the presence of a conflict between the Commission and the member states with regard to the role and scope of supranational social and welfare policy (see Collins 1975: 32–3, 99). As we shall see ahead, this struggle and conflict over the aim and scope of Community social policy would resurface in conjunction with the economic downturn in the 1970s, as well as during both the Single Market reforms in the 1980s and the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s.
Failing to gain a hearing for its larger social policy objectives, much of the Commission’s efforts in this area during the 1960s and 70s would thus focus on obtaining substantial social rights for internal labor migrants and their families.3 This became apparent in the numerous initiatives, programs, and new supranational legislation emanating out of Brussels, all of which aimed to facilitate the migrants’ situation both at and outside their new workplaces. The migrants were not only to be treated in exactly the same way as domestic workers with regard to wages, working conditions, information rights, dismissal, and trade union rights; they were also to receive equal social welfare, equally favorable social insurances, and equal or even prioritized access to housing. The Commission also devoted much energy to ensure the right to family reunification for labor migrants, and that the families of labor migrants were given the same rights as nationals concerning working life and social benefits.
Even though the term “integration policy” (directed at migrants) had not been coined in the European context at the time, several of the Community social policy measures targeting internal labor migrants assumed the character of what subsequently in the 1980s and 90s would come to belong under that policy heading (Collins 1975: 101). According to the Commission’s recommendations and the supranational provisions that gradually were adopted, labor migrants and their families were thus to be offered the best possible practical preparations for their move to another member state. They were also to be provided with assistance to psychologically prepare for work and life in a new country, and encouraged to keep in touch with family and friends who did not join them. Another priority was to make sure that migrants were given sufficient information about their social rights in the new country. While language courses should be offered, migrants should also be assisted by personnel who spoke their language so as to guarantee that all information was properly conveyed. Such personnel were also to facilitate migrants’ acquaintance with the new country’s culture and traditions as well as put them into contact with social and cultural associations.
As is evident, Community policy took pains to prevent a situation where member-state citizens would be degraded to second-class citizens when they moved to and started work in a member state other than the one where they held national citizenship. If this would be the case, the reasoning went at the time, intra-Community labor migration would hardly stand a chance of gathering the type of momentum necessary to meet the demand. Most actors were also practically in agreement that the free movement of labor migrants should not be allowed to lead to (what is today termed) social dumping, whereby richer member states and their corporations would start to use migrants from poorer ones for the purpose of lowering salary and welfare levels for the domestic labor force (see Collins 1975; Flanagan 1993; Geddes 2000a: 213).
More than a “Manifesto for Capital”
Given the Rome Treaty’s strong emphasis on growth, economies and production bases of scale, internal free trade, free circulation for capital, and competitiveness, it is little wonder that many scholars have likened the Rome Treaty to a “manifesto for capital” (Williams 1994: 181). In many ways this is an appropriate simile (see further Carchedi 2001; Cocks 1980; Holland 1980; Mandel 1970; Moschonas 1996); or as the first European Commission President, Walter Hallstein (1972: 29), put it: “the basic law of the European Economic Community, its whole philosophy, is liberal. Its guiding principle is to establish undistorted competition in an undivided market.” But if we are to understand the concurrent and rather successful work that the Commission carried out to ensure intra-Community migrants and their families’ social rights (i.e. their social citizenship), the “manifesto for capital” simile needs to be qualified historically. During the first three postwar decades, capitalism and capital interests stood in a different relation to labor and welfare than they have done since the profound political-economic changes that began to transpire in the 1970s and 80s. For reasons of both a functional and political nature, this meant that capital accumulation and the power of corporate interests were embedded within and in many respects subordinated to the building of welfare states in Western Europe. To a large extent this was made possible by the “embedded liberal” postwar Bretton Woods system; an international political-economic regime, which bound states accountable to an international system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls (Ruggie 1982). European integration was in large parts both a result of and a response to this international regime’s way of functioning. Characteristic of embedded liberalism was that it admitted, and in some sense had its basis in, a relative compatibility between international economic liberalization (i.e. multilateralism) and the build-up of national welfare states (i.e. social stability) in Western Europe (Ruggie 1982).
Such a relative compatibility was also built into the Community project from its commencement in the 1950s. It is thus through the conceptual lens of embedded liberalism that we can appreciate how the Rome Treaty and European integration could make up both a “manifesto for capital” and a springboard for internal labor migrants’ social rights. As we will discuss more ahead, the imposing of transition arrangements by the old members on the free movement for the new member state citizens in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and the fact that this was largely motivated by an unwillingness on the part of the old member governments to grant new member labor migrants the social rights belonging to free movement, is just one of many cases verifying the diminishing role played by embedded liberalism in the current European political-economic order.
Different Regimes of Migration and Migrants’ Unequal Rights
Despite the efforts that were invested to stimulate the labor mobility between the member states, it soon became apparent that intra-Community labor migration was far from keeping pace with the Community’s great labor demand in the 1950s and 60s. As a consequence, the majority of migrant labor would instead come and be recruited from countries outside of the EEC. To be sure, from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s intra-Community migration almost doubled in size. Yet, this increase was modest when compared to the growth of extra-Community labor migration to the EEC. Up until the early 1960s internal and external migration grew at approximately the same pace, with the former slightly ahead. Toward the end of the decade, this relationship had been entirely reversed; now the external side was supplying over 80 percent of the Community’s labor migrants (Ascoli 1985; Flanagan 1993; see also CEC 1976 [1974]).
It was thus extra-Community migrants who would fill the brunt of the great postwar demand for labor, and, by so doing, also maintain the high growth rates achieved during the period (Williams, 1994: 43). To a large extent these migrants were recruited via the member states’ different guest worker programs, and mainly came from Europe’s poorer Mediterranean countries—that is, Greece, Portugal, and Spain—and from Yugoslavia and Turkey. But this migration also bore the stamp of both colonial and neocolonial relationships, where many migrants would come from Belgian, French, and Dutch colonies and former colonies. Colonial, but soon foremost neocolonial relationships, were, in this sense, not only advantageous for the EEC in terms of trade and supply of raw materials, advantages which had been procured through the association agreements established at the outset between the EEC and member states’ colonies and former colonies (i.e. the Yaoundé, Lomé and, today, the Cotonou agreement); they were also to prove beneficial in providing the Community with a source of much needed labor (MacLaughlin, 1993).4
As noted earlier, migration from countries outside the EEC was to remain an area of national responsibility, governed and regulated by the respective governments and their, among themselves, very different and (historically) path dependent policy regimes of admission, recruitment, and incorporation (or “integration”) of migrants. A bifurcated, or dualized, system for the regulation and handling of migration to the member states was thus established almost from the outset, whereby the Community’s internal respectively external migration were to sort under different policy regimes and legal frameworks.
As it turned out, moreover, the Rome Treaty’s clause on free movement was to apply exclusively to member state citizens, thereby excluding the external migrants, or the third-country nationals (TCNs), from the right of free movement within the Community. Interestingly enough, this exclusive application was not stipulated by the treaty itself; the treaty’s articles on free movement only referred to “workers” and did not make any explicit distinction between member state citizens and TCNs (Geddes 2000a; Hoogenboom 1992; Kostakopoulou 2001). Rather, it was the member-state governments that, through legislation in the Council of Ministers in the 1960s, decided to restrict free movement to only include member-state citizens (Geddes 2000a; Hoskyns 1996: 169).5 Given the strong economic motives behind the endeavor to stimulate intra-Community labor mobility, such a curtailment is difficult to explain with reference to a simple cost-benefit calculation. We raise this in view of the fact that the inclusion of TCNs in the free movement regime clearly would have served to increase labor mobility within the Community. According to Theodora Kostakopoulou (2001: 183), the decision instead needs to be viewed in the light of an increasingly negative attitude toward migration from less well off and, most of all, non-European countries that was to take shape in the 1960s (see also Steedman 1979). Indirectly, therefore, the decision contributed to the institutionalization of a perception of who did and who did not belong to the European Community. By excluding TCNs from the free movement provisions, Kostakopoulou (2001: 184–5) goes on, the prospects were also thwarted for the institution of criteria other than nationality, or formal citizenship in a member state, for an individual’s belonging to and membership in the Community.
In addition to this, it was also decided early on that internal migrants (i.e. member-state citizens) should have preference over external migrants to employment in the Community—a rule that was upheld in the first stage completion of the free movement scheme in 1968 (Swann 1988: 161). The rule was foremost reflective of an Italian interest to facilitate as much as possible the outflow of its labor surplus to the other member states. Initially this was met with opposition from the West German government, which, owing to its large labor demand, wanted a free hand to recruit labor also from outside the Community. But since it soon became apparent that the intra-Community labor migration would come nowhere near meeting West German labor demands, Bonn’s requests were never challenged; thus, the conflicting Italian and West German interests would not have to come to a head. It should be noted though, that the Commission was a warm advocate of these preferential rights for member-state citizens, and for long it clung to a conviction that these rights would indeed impact intra-Community labor migration positively in relation to external migration (Collins 1975: 104–5, 114–5).
As we shall discuss further ahead, the dualized order is still in place, although in a slightly modified form, and since the mid-1980s its ever more conspicuous consequences have been the subject of an equally ever-growing debate (see e.g. Ireland 1996: 136).
Crisis and a Search for Alternatives
The years spanning the late 1960s to the mid-1970s are often pinpointed as the starting point for a period of structural crisis and transformation for continental Western European models of capitalism. A general economic downturn, triggered initially by skyrocketing oil prices and characterized by mounting stagflation, growing unemployment, and decreasing wage shares in national income, ignited a fierce ideological battle between monetarists and Keynesians on how to best manage the changing conditions of the West European political economy (Boyer 1990).
This battle was further complicated by the changing structural conditions of the global political economy, as continental European states were pressed to formulate policy responses to the U.S. and U.K. pole position in abandoning the international compromise of embedded liberalism through “the liberalization of independent finance from Keynesian controls” already in the late-1960s (Holman and van der Pijl 1996: 63; see also Helleiner 1994). Heightened capital mobility and the “vocabulary” of “interdependence and competitiveness” (Cox 1992: 27) that accompanied it raised uncertainties about the future sustainability of continental Europe’s models of welfare capitalism and their extensive social citizenship regimes. All in all, as Stockhammer (2005–6: 195–6) notes, it is important to emphasise that the actual effects of the crisis of the 1970s were experienced unevenly by the various social classes within Europe. The rising tide of joblessness and wage stagnation can indeed be regarded as nothing short of a crisis for Europe’s working classes; one which they have yet to recover from. But for the capitalist classes, the downturn of the 1970s is best thought of as a temporary lull in performance whereby brief and modest dips in profit incomes were soon restored to their post-war “Golden Age” levels.
The general weakening of Western Europe’s overall economic performance in this period also contributed to the activation of the Community-level as a forum for new discussions on how to meet and amend the crisis. Much of this discussion would center on social issues, on the future of welfare, and the question of citizenship (Hoskyns 1996: 79; Williams 1994: 182). The initiative also formed an integral part of an effort to increase popular support for European integration and, as it also was expressed, to put a “human face” on the European Community (Meehan 1993: 70–2; Williams 1994: 182). In the aftermath of the student revolts of 1968 and on the initiative of Willy Brandt’s West German government, the Community launched grand plans for a “European Social Union” and a set of social issues was placed on the agenda (Carchedi 2001: 240; Meehan 1993: 70–1). At the Paris European Council in 1972, Community leaders gave their support for a strengthening of Community social policy, and two years later the first ever Community Social Action Program was adopted (see Council EC 1974). The program was extensive and called for action to eliminate unemployment, improve living and working conditions, reinforce employee codetermination and gender equality in the labor market. But the program also indicated a new approach in that intra-Community migrants no longer made up the sole target group for supranational social policy. Community social policy was from then on also to target the unemployed, women, the disabled, youth, and extra-Community migrants.
The Formation of a Discourse on Citizenship at the Supranational Level
The new social initiatives were also to trigger the first explicit discussions as regards a Community or “European” citizenship. Although “Citizenship of the Union,” or a formal EU citizenship, was not to become part of the treaty until 1993—with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty—the idea of creating such a citizenship for the EEC and subsequently the EC had been discussed off and on for many years (Wiener 1997: 537–8). References to “the citizens of Europe,” “Community citizens,” and a “Citizens’ Europe” were thus frequent long before the legal category “citizen of the Union” had been established.6
The first tangible initiatives toward the creation of the present EU citizenship were taken at the Paris summit between the Community’s heads of state and government in 1974, where a working group was set up for the purpose of studying what was referred to as “special rights” for member states’ citizens (CEC 1993b: 1; see also CEC 1996a: 5). Prior to the 1974 summit the Copenhagen foreign ministers’ meeting in 1973 had put forth a “Declaration on European identity” that (although it did not bring up the concept of a Community citizenship in the explicit) incorporated a discourse that to some extent would fit subsequent articulations of “European citizenship.” Among other things, the “Declaration on European identity” spoke of the urgent need to focus on the shared “heritage” and “to ensure the survival of the civilization” which the Community countries and the potential new members were said to have in common (CEC 1973).
In 1976 the Tindemans Report7 to the European Council would develop and expand on these interventions and link them directly to the idea of a “Citizens’ Europe.” Under this heading the Tindemans Report argued that in order for the Community to “be close to its citizens” the “values which are their common heritage” had to be safeguarded (Tindemans 1976: 26). It also explicated that “we,” the peoples of the European Community, “must build a type of society which is ours alone and which reflects the values which are the heritage and the common creation of our peoples”; a society “which respects the basic values of our civilization” (Tindemans 1976: 12).
But the grounding of a “European citizenship” in these self-assured views on heritage and civilization was only part of the story. Given its favorable inclination toward social reform during these years (Hoskyns 1996: 78–83; Hantrais 1995: 1, 5; Rossilli 1999), the Community also included social and economic issues in its discussion of citizenship. In the 1976 Tindemans report, for instance, the goal of full employment together with ideas of economic and industrial democracy were discussed as part of the citizenship agenda (see Hoskyns 1996: 78–83).8 As the powers over economic policy gradually moved to transnational arenas, it was argued, “this problem should be solved at the European level by increasing worker participation in the management, control or profits of business” (Tindemans 1976: 25). The “security of the workforce, . . . and their participation in company decisions and company profits” were seen by the Report as policy objectives to be managed at the “European level” in order to “restore to us at Union level that element of protection and control of our society which is progressively slipping from the grasp of State authority due to the nature of the problems and the internationalization of social life” (Tindemans 1976: 24, 28). “[E]conomic and social rights,” as citizens” rights, were thus seen as matters which should be managed by empowered Community institutions. As a consequence, intergovernmental arrangements were ruled out as unable to deal with “our collective needs” and the future social dilemmas of economic and corporate transnationalization (Tindemans 1976: 26, 29).
Community Citizenship and Migration
In conjunction with these developments, there were also some tentative signs that issues pertaining to external migration and resident TCNs were beginning to receive some consideration at the Community level. The growing attention being directed at social welfare and citizenship can thus be said to have been conducive to bringing also the situation for external migrants on the supranational agenda—and this for the very first time. The matter was not only touched upon in the 1974 Social Action Program; that same year the Commission also presented a proposal for an action program exclusively focusing on the question of migration, entitled “Action Program in favour of migrant workers and their families” (CEC 1976 [1974]). It should be said that the program chiefly focused on the situation for internal, free moving migrants, whom at this moment still were spoken of and categorized as migrants. But also external migrants, and particularly those domiciled, were given quite some consideration.
By discussing the situation for internal and external migrants in the same breath, the Commission also put the finger on what it took to be an ever more problematic and embarrassing division within the Community between two groups of migrants; two groups who despite being bound by basically the same obligations nonetheless lived under very different and unequal circumstances when it came to the enjoyment of rights and freedoms. As noted by the Commission (1976 [1974]: 14) at the time: “[T]he legal situation of migrant workers coming from third countries depends on the status accorded to them by the host country. . . . The result is that migrant workers from third countries are generally treated less favourably than workers coming from the Member States, and the situation of these third country migrants varies considerably from one country to another.” Furthermore:
[T]he social conditions of the migrant do indeed give cause for serious concern—especially in the case of third country migrants, who have no Community protection and rely solely on often restrictive national legislation . . . For this reason solutions in common must be found, not only to the problems of Community migrants but also for those from third countries. These solutions must take account of the migrant workers’ needs and their rightful place in a society to whose prosperity and well-being they contribute. As the migrant population increases, and they remain longer in the Community, so their interests in the affluent society around them increases and their sense of exclusion from it can become more acute. (CEC 1976 [1974]: 12)
On this view, the Commission called for measures to improve migrants’ lot in general, and to gradually phase out the discrepancies with regard to rights and legal status between internal and external migrants. The fact, for instance, that TCNs ran an unwarranted high risk of being deported was addressed, and the Commission criticized the member states for the ways in which they were utilizing the deportation instrument. However, the Commission would not go as far as proposing that the right of free movement, and the rights and entitlements belonging to it, be granted to TCNs. Nonetheless, for its time these were still quite forcible formulations, and as is evident from the unfavourable depiction of the “restrictive” member states they also marked a certain divergence of opinion between the Commission and the member governments as concerned migration policy.
In connection with this, the Commission went on to caution that unless migrants’ predicaments were alleviated this would contribute to a climate that was conducive to a growing racism and xenophobia. Therefore, measures were needed to enhance migrants’ “integration” (this was probably the first time the term was used in the EU context) into society; and member states were asked to begin a coordination of their, among themselves, very dissimilar migration policies toward countries outside the Community. In addition, governments were requested to work out common measures to come to terms with “illegal immigration,” which the Commission saw as a large and fast growing problem. In sharp contrast to its future outlook on the matter, which we will discuss ahead, the Commission was mostly concerned about the situation for “illegals” as such: that they lived under an impending danger of being deported; had little or no access to medical care and social services; and that they were exposed to exploitation from employers (CEC 1976 [1974]: 21).
In summing up the European Commission’s work in the 1970s, we have seen that a significant portion of it was to coalesce around the question of rights, in general, and of social rights of citizenship, in particular. Firstly, the established citizenship rights for member-state citizens needed to be safeguarded, developed through the addition of rights of economic democracy, and adapted to a transforming economic environment by way of more powers and responsibilities vested at the supranational level. Secondly, albeit not formulated in these exact terms, the free movement–induced transnational citizenship for intra-Community migrants needed to be fully developed and on a par with rights of national citizenship, so as to simultaneously stimulate factor mobility and avoid migrants’ degradation to second-class citizens, a prospect that was seen as putting a break on people’s readiness to migrate. Third, and finally, the Commission had also begun to broach the issue of extra-Community migration and the problems facing TCNs; and, in addition to this, it had begun to lift the lid on the issue of “illegal immigration.” In this context most of the attention was directed at TCNs’ lack of many of the rights associated with national citizenships, on the one hand, and their exclusion from the (transnational) rights of free movement, on the other. To cite an indignant Commission yet again:
In fact, after more than a decade of benefit from migrant labour, the Community finds itself with a large unassimilated group of foreign workers, who share almost all the obligations of the society in which they live and work but, more often than not, have a less than equal share in its benefits and rights. This situation is in the long term intolerable—degrading for the migrant and dangerous for the Community. (CEC 1976 [1974]: 12)
Conclusion: Slouching Toward “Euro-pessimism”
Despite the work invested in the many initiatives by the Commission and other actors in the 1970s, the concrete outcomes would be meagre indeed; and this was true of supranational efforts in both the fields of social and migration policy (Dinan 1999: 421; Hoskyns 1996: 82–3). The European Parliament continued to push for the ideas behind the concept of a “Citizens’ Europe,” but here too the tangible results were very few, which was partly due to a reluctance on part of the Council (CEC 1993b: 5; Hoskyns 1996: 83). Over and above that, practically nothing was done to expand the supranational mandate and authorities within the policy areas at hand. Rather, member states remained in control and the Council of Ministers made sure to water down the various Community programs on social and migration policy so that they mostly would come to function as mere consultative assessments, instead of gaining binding status (see Geddes 2000a, 2000b: 157–8). Expanded supranational powers demanded that all member governments agreed to such a transfer of authority, and as the development in the 1970s was to make clear governments would prove far from inclined to set about to negotiate such a consensus (Hoskyns 1996: 80–1). With the exception of the social and migration policy belonging to free movement, these policy areas would thus remain within member state purview.
If adding to this that the member states also thwarted Community efforts to expand the supranational mandate within economic policy, we can sense why the development from the mid-1970s and onward often is described as a period marked by “Euro-pessimism,” “Eurosclerosis,” and Community stagnation (Dinan 1999: 57–80). The picture gets accentuated by the fact that the supranational level was denied any instruments able to mitigate the consequences of the economic downturn and crisis whose full effects would not become visible until the latter part of the 1970s (Williams 1994: 5). In retrospect, therefore, the Paris European Council in 1972 represented a set of delusive hopes for those forces advocating more of supranational influence over measures to remedy weak economic growth, high unemployment, social problems, and obstacles facing extra-Community migrants. Among the many proposals and initiatives tabled by the Commission and other like-minded actors in the 1970s, it was those in favor of enhanced gender equality that, by far, would fair best (Hoskyns 1996: 78; see also Mazey 1988). As for extra-Community migration and the situation for TCNs, these issues would basically be dormant on the supranational agenda until the launching of the Single Market was to resurrect them in the latter part of the 1980s. The same was to apply to the question of “European citizenship.”
Yet, what had been demonstrated with some force in the 1970s was that many Community policy makers, members of the European Parliament, but also member state actors had become convinced that if the integration project was to progress it could not afford to sidestep the question of a Community citizenship. They were, in other words, convinced that for the project to be able to enthuse the general public, which was seen as a requirement for further integration, it had to find a new and strong mobilizing appeal that went beyond the one concerned solely with the alleged benefits of economic and market integration. By the mid-1980s, a dual consensus was therefore starting to foment. On the one hand, it was increasingly accepted that the range of national responses to the over a decade-long transformations in European capitalism were no longer adequate, and that a “relaunch of the EU integration process” was the only response to ensure the strength and competitiveness in an increasingly integrated world economy (see Grahl and Teague 1992). On the other hand, it was recognized that the successful deepening and widening of the European project could not proceed without the concomitant fostering of a sense of belonging within the nascent supranational political community. As we reach the time period for the launch of the Single Market this, what we may call, legitimacy argument for “European citizenship” was to reverberate yet again; and it has done so ever since.
Notes
1. For a similar account, see for example Sassen (1999: 152–3).
2. While Britain and Ireland did not enact transition rules for the EU’s new members in 2004 (although they did introduce restrictions on social welfare entitlements for the new EU citizens, something Sweden did not), they did impose such rules for Bulgaria and Romania in 2007.
3. The other priority area, besides internal labor migration, for Community social policy during this time period was made up by gender equality (see further e.g. Hoskyns 1994; Mazey 1988; Meehan 1993).
4. For an exhaustive account of postwar migration to countries in Western Europe, its driving forces and consequences, see Castles and Kosack (1985) and Castles and Miller (2003). For a specific account of the different types of guest worker systems employed by Western European countries, see Castles and Miller (2003: Ch. 4).
5. Indirectly TCNs were provided with some limited possibilities to enjoy the right of free movement, as in cases where a TCN was married to a member state citizen who made use of the right of free movement.
6. See for example Tindemans (1976); and CEC (1984).
7. Commissioned by the Community’s heads of state and government at the Paris summit in 1974, the Tindemans Report was drawn up by Belgium’s prime minister Leo Tindemans.
8. Similar statements reflecting such a reform-minded agenda are found in the “Council Resolution of 21 January 1974 concerning a social action programme” (Council EC 1974).
