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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
European Integration and the Problem of Citizenship
On People, Parrots, and the Politics of EU Citizenship
Popular appreciation and European integration are two phenomena that rarely seem to coincide these days. Two decades of heartbreaking referenda have clearly taken their toll; so much that parts of the EU establishment at times convey the impression of having lost confidence in the EU citizenry. As the chasm has widened, so has the stream of invectives being hurled against the unappreciative public. In the summer of 2008, after the Irish had cast their No vote to the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, it was time for this lack of confidence to resurface yet again. In fact, many EU leaders’ and pundits’ reactions to the No vote brought to mind the lines in Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 poem “The Solution” (“Die Lösung”): “Would it / not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”. Indeed, “The Irish will have to vote again,” was President Sarkozy’s immediate reaction. His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, did not mince matters either, lambasting the Irish as “ungrateful,” adding: “It would be very, very awkward if we couldn’t count on the Irish, who themselves have counted a great deal on Europe’s money” (quoted in Barber 2008). For his part, the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, derided the naysayers as epitomizing the egoistic “me generation.” “We have an obligation,” his reprimand went on, “to those who have gone before us and sacrificed so much for our national progress to conduct ourselves as citizens not just as consumers” (quoted in Murray Brown 2008). (It had become high time, in other words, to replace the entrepreneurial cubs of the “Celtic Tiger” with the God-fearing sheep of Europe.) Apart from accusations of ungratefulness and selfishness, No voters were also branded as anti-immigration and intolerant, even racist, these having become standard epithets used to morally disparage those who allegedly hold negative views of Europe.
But in addition to the poetic (in)justice, there was also an element of humor to the story. In its swift answer to the question whether the parrot really was dead, a Monty Pythonesque European Commission delivered a resounding No, its president, Jose Manuel Barroso, simply stating that “the treaty is alive” and that “the European Commission believes that the remaining ratifications should continue to take their course” (quoted in Vucheva 2008). In so doing, President Barroso, not the Irish No voters, was actually contravening both the letter and spirit of one of the EU’s most basic principles, namely, that all new treaties have to be taken unanimously by all member states. Faced with an Irish electorate of selfish and intolerant ungratefuls, however, such contravention seemed like a price worth paying; or, more likely, there was not even a conception of such a price in the first place. Today, rather, the stakes in the European project seem too high to make room for much level-headed reflection and dialogue on the part of the EU leadership, let alone any serious explication of what those stakes are that seemingly cannot afford the least bit of popular hesitation as to the EU’s allegedly benign influence on people’s livelihoods and future prospects. After all, and as expressed with utter clarity for many years now, the EU claims as its first priority the service of the European citizens. Yet if the EU truly wants a relationship with citizens, and not merely with subjects, few would argue that such a relationship could rest solely on the latter’s obligations to the former—since that would be in radical breach of everything smacking of a modern conception of citizenship. Instead, such a relationship would necessarily also have to be built on a conception of citizens as possessors of rights whereby they could gain a stake in the EU project. In the Irish referendum, as on so many other occasions when the EU project stands at the direct mercy of popular scrutiny, the majority of voters were not approached as citizens of the European Union. In other words, they were not seen as worthy of a stake.
Outlining the Historical Background
This book aims to describe and analyse the current nexus of citizenship and the EU project, recognizing, however, that such an analysis could not go very far unless it proceeds from a historical perspective. Before we spell out our more specific aims, and before we delve any further into the current problematic, let us therefore take a moment here to preview some of the historical antecedents of the contemporary predicament.
To begin with, it is important to remember that although the project of European integration was launched already in the 1950s, it would wait until the 1970s before the matters of popular legitimacy and participation were to enter the integration equation in any noticeable fashion. Cast in the still prevalent social democratic mold at the time, these matters, as we discuss in Chapter 2, were to form part of various initiatives pushing for greater European Community authority and involvement in the 1970s economic crisis management. For such Community involvement to be legitimate and effective, it was argued, it had to proceed in tandem with the launch of a “European citizenship” scheme, establishing a direct link of substantial social rights and policy influence between member-state citizens and the Community level. However, falling prey to the so-called Eurosclerosis (or Euro-pessimism) hitting the Community in the mid-1970s, which stalled much of the progress on European integration up until the early 1980s, these initiatives would basically all come to naught. Yet, what had been shown with some force was that many Community policy makers had become convinced that if European integration was to go forward it had to be able to enthuse the general public and so find a mobilizing argument outside the realm purely concerned with market integration.
After the initiatives in the 1970s it would take until the mid- and late 1980s before the time proved ripe again for the question of “European citizenship” to gain a foothold on the Community agenda. Unlike in the 1970s, however, this time the efforts to boost the Community’s popular legitimacy were neither of a primarily social democratic bent, nor were they principally initiated in order to pave the way for integration steps not yet taken. Rather, they were launched so as to bestow retroactive popular legitimacy onto giant integration steps that had already been taken, without prior consultation with the member-state citizens. These giant steps of European integration of course refer to the Single Market project, launched in 1985, and to the new treaty that underwrote it: the Single European Act (SEA, ratified in 1987), which made up the first sizeable revision of the Community’s founding treaties. As we shall discuss at some length in Chapter 3, the neoliberal-inspired Single Market—with its attempts to subject ever greater areas of social life to the commodifying logic of the market and the principle of free movement—was to induce significant social and political transformations in the member states. Igniting a development whereby more and more policy areas and future challenges to the member states started to take on a “European dimension”—in everything from social welfare and macroeconomy to third-country migration and asylum policy—these transformations continue to cast their shadow on today’s developments. Suffice it to say, too, that the vexed question of the EU’s “democratic deficit” derives its origin from the changes brought about by the Single Market and the SEA. To be sure, the architects of the Single Market and the SEA were well aware of the consequential impact of their creations. In addition, many of these same architects, the most important among them being the president of the European Commission himself, Jacques Delors, were also aware of these creations’ potentially adverse effects, particularly for the Community’s laborers.
It is therefore no coincidence that the Single Market transformations were to walk hand in hand with a concerted effort to rally member-state citizens around the reborn European integration. This effort can be broken down into roughly four subsets of initiatives. First, there was the launch of the extensive campaign to foster a popular sense of “European identity,” broadcast under such headings as “People’s Europe” and “Citizens’ Europe,” urging member nationals to embrace and unite around their common European cultural values and civilizational heritage. As part of this, Brussels worked hard to both introduce new and revive old Community symbols, as seen in the promotion of an EU anthem, a flag, a Europe Day and a new EU passport design. Second, citizens were to be made aware of the new opportunities presented by the Single Market’s open internal borders (free movement) and deregulated markets, highlighting the benefits to be reaped by European entrepreneurs, professionals, students, consumers, and tourists. In addition, and third, Europeans were promised the creation of a “social Europe,” working so as to counterbalance any socially unfavorable effects that might result from the new “market making” Europe. Fourth, and finally, popular legitimacy for the Single Market transformations was also sought via Brussels and member-state governments’ firm assurance that the new Europe of open internal borders by no means was to imply an increase in immigration from non-member countries, or that international crime was to be allowed to take advantage of the abolition of internal border controls. In this sense, the budding European citizenship fashioned itself as a security bulwark protecting citizens against a number of perceived new threats, among which “illegal” immigration and “bogus” asylum seeking increasingly were being placed on the same footing as international crime and drug trafficking, even terrorism.1 This also meant that from now on the EU’s politics of citizenship was to be indissolubly bound up with the EU’s politics of third-country migration.
As the EU entered the 1990s and the period for the launching of the next treaty revisions in Maastricht—paving the way for the Union’s subsequent great step toward monetary union (the EMU)—the question of popular legitimacy was similarly to be taken to the next level. It was not long after the Maastricht Treaty had been signed (in the winter of 1992), then, before it became evident that the EU’s legitimacy efforts and citizenship policy so far had fallen short of their goals. When member-state populations began in the 1990s to feel the socioeconomic impact of the Single Market more directly, it seemed as if they had also started to develop feelings about European integration. And although popular involvement with the integration project had for years been sought by EU institutions and governments, once such involvement started to germinate in the 1990s much of it turned out to be an unpleasant surprise. It was thus telling that the very same treaty, i.e. the Maastricht Treaty, which endowed member-state nationals with a formal “European citizenship”—or “Citizenship of the Union”/EU citizenship2—should also set off a referenda induced ratification crisis that soon put a damper on the Single Market’s “Euro-optimism.”
Regardless of the eventual ratification of the new treaty in 1993, thanks to a Danish referendum revote overriding its initial No to the treaty, Maastricht was to become emblematic of an emerging rift between the “new Europe” and large strata of the EU citizenry. For the EU leadership this constituted a development of great concern, a fact that was to be emphatically confirmed in countless public statements and initiatives throughout the 1990s. Hence, the European Commission took great pains to stress that the Union “depends for its very legitimacy on its citizens” (Commission of the European Communities 1993a: 15; henceforward abbreviated as CEC); and that the “penalty for failure” to gain the citizens’ confidence “is that citizenship of the Union may appear to be a distant concept for citizens engendering confusion as to its means and objectives even fuelling anti-EU feelings” (CEC 1997a: 1). Maastricht, as Wallace and Smith (1995: 150–151) argue, thus meant that not only had “the democratic credentials of European integration” come under public scrutiny; it had also “forced European elites to accept that public support for further integration could not be taken for granted” (see also Beetham and Lord 1998: 15).
A Harrowing Option
There can be no gainsaying that the experiences from the early 1990s made clear that popular consent to further integration had to be earned, rather than simply assumed. What was made much less clear, though, was the extent to which “European elites” would be ready to “accept” popular discontent and thus bow to the fact that their subsequent plans for “further integration” might fail to earn sufficient popular consent. Today, some fifteen years after the Maastricht ratification crisis, this latter question still lingers unanswered; and we take it to be no wild guess that the failure to provide an unambiguous answer goes some way to explain why successive EU referenda, on the whole, have turned out to be such distressing, even harrowing events. By not answering the question in favor of the verdict of the popular vote, European elites have instead retained the (pre-democratic) option to nullify the vote at will, by for instance forcing revotes, as in the Irish case in 2008–9, or, as in the case of the Franco-Dutch No to the EU’s Constitutional Treaty in 2005, by simply applying cosmetic changes. This option, it seems, has not only proven harrowing for voters. That is, once decision makers start to eye the option—always in breach of pre-election promises to the contrary—they are also forced to reframe the referenda in terms of a moral choice, rather than a political one. (In reality, all the referenda on the EU so far have undoubtedly been formulated as political choices, formally speaking, some add “technical” choices, but never have they been formally designed as moral choices.) As borne out by practically all the post-referenda debates up until now, the reason for overturning a popular judgment is thus primarily motivated with a more or less implicit reference to a moral imperative. The popular verdict gets disqualified not because it is deemed politically unfeasible, but because it is deemed morally reprehensible. Hence, voters throwing wrenches into the EU works are branded as ungrateful, selfish, racist, nationalist, intolerant, ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, and so on and so forth. This is where it gets harrowing also for “European elites,” since we must assume that most of them know full well that this type of obvious manipulation always tends to backfire. As The Economist (2008) noted, commenting on the debate following upon the Irish referendum: “Why would Irish mainstream politicians want to scapegoat immigration, and paint their own voters as intolerant? Perhaps because they know that they ran a wretched yes campaign.” For students of European integration, this is also where we can get a sense of the enormous stakes involved in the European integration of today, of the enormous public credibility gaps that the EU’s political leaderships are prepared to open up in order to have their will.
EU Referenda and the Politics of EU Citizenship
Since these stakes were nowhere more evident than in the debates surrounding the French and Dutch referenda on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty in 2005—where a high turnout of voters overwhelmingly said No to the political proposal put before them—we also need to take a moment to reflect on what took place here. While this book is not about EU referenda per se, we take the referendum’s character, as a rare medium whereby citizens are put in direct political contact with the EU project, to be offering exceptionally pertinent clues as to the meaning and content of EU citizenship. That is to say, the referenda and the reactions they engender provide exceptionally good starting points for reflection on the various and often contradictory and situation-specific registers of EU citizenship—specifying the traits distinguishing an “ideal,” or “model,” EU citizen—that EU institutions, political leaders and other influential actors decide to make use of, or not make use of, in different contexts.
In line with our account above, the approach adopted by Brussels, governments, and most other elite voices to the French and Dutch referenda was very much articulated in moral terms, thus seeing little merit in discussing the outcome as an expression of a conscious political choice, based on what voters took the Constitutional Treaty to stand for in a political sense. The refusal to take the No vote for a political answer was underscored too by the fact that the results had barely been made public before the news media was brimming with voices asking what it was that people actually had voted No to. While the answers provided were many and varied the great majority of them agreed on a basic message that held the No vote in more or less moral contempt. As would be the case in the subsequent debate on the Irish referendum, voters were depicted as ignorant, uninformed, anti-immigration, intolerant, nationalist, and as inimical to globalization, “open economies,” and “employment-friendly” labor markets.
In contrast to the Irish case, though, the commentary on the French and Dutch referenda, both prior to and after the elections, was much more prone to depict the No side as anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and racist. In particular, No voters were made out to be hostile to labor migrants from the new Eastern and Central European member states, epitomized by “the Polish plumber,” as well as to a Turkish EU membership. True, such sentiments did exist among those voting No—as they did exist among those voting Yes (see e.g. Hainsworth 2006). But the allegation that virulent xenophobia, racism, and the like had a significant impact on the solid majority of the No voters—made up of leftists and greens in both France and the Netherlands—was at best the cry of a sore loser.3 Above all, what these accusations in effect served to achieve was to relocate the referenda beyond the pale of liberal democracy. Like in previous and subsequent ones, the referenda were rather cast as inverted votes of moral confidence; instead of respecting citizens’ free political choice to decide whether or not they had confidence in the proposal put before them, it was governments, Brussels, and scores of pundits, intellectuals, and corporate voices who, in the end, decided to declare the great majority of voters morally incapacitated. Accordingly, you were either with the enlightened (some would say cosmopolitan) Europeans, or you were with the bigoted nationalists.
In essence, such was also the message from Jürgen Habermas—European post-nationalism’s most renowned interpreter—who, together with a group of other intellectuals, called on voters to do the right thing and vote Yes: “We owe it to the millions and millions of victims of our senseless wars and criminal dictatorships” (quoted in Watkins 2005: 7). “If we look at Auschwitz,” said the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, “we know why we must accept the European Constitution” (quoted in European Citizen Action Service 2006: 14). First vice president of the European Commission, Margot Wallström, issued a similar admonition when advocating a Yes in a speech in the former Jewish ghetto of Terezin. As if this was not enough, the Dutch minister for justice went on to warn that naysayers were paving the way for “Balkanization” and war in Europe (Watkins 2005).
Such were the elite reactions to allegedly anti-European votes that, as borne out by numerous polls, after all just bore the stamp of an old arch-European tradition that refuses to call it quits; in reality, that is, they were reactions to votes largely anchored in class politics and mundane socioeconomic issues. Besides low-income constituencies and allies of the political left, however, also the young and women voted strongly against the treaty. Apparently, a treaty giving no indications of trying to dilute the long-standing EU formula of neoliberal “market making” for the benefit of welfare and social rights protection proved the wrong recipe for the types of socioeconomic problems that large cohorts within the No camp were addressing. And we should like to note that there were a few voices from within the moderate Yes camp that eventually came around to concede this banal point. Although reproaching No voters for “nationalist” and “isolationist thinking,” even a couple of hardliners could be heard echoing the self-evident; said Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens (2005): “We know that the ‘no’ votes in France and the Netherlands were motivated substantially by social and economic anxieties.”
In no uncertain terms, then, the referenda evince that when people fail to comply with the political-economic register of European citizenship, as laid down in the EU’s Lisbon Agenda/Lisbon Strategy (adopted in 2000 and distinct from the 2009 Lisbon treaty), they are promptly vilified as intolerant nationalists, anti-immigration, ignorant, selfish, and so on. To have qualms about the political economic orientation of European integration, and thus being in favour of setting the EU onto a different political economic course, more attuned to social welfare objectives, are consequently positions that are relegated from serious consideration on the EU agenda. As we shall discuss in some detail ahead, however, such has not always been the case. Well into the 1990s, calls to dilute neoliberal orthodoxy could be heard from the highest levels of the EU. Also today, as we shall examine at length as well, the EU’s pledge to respect the “European Social Model” (ESM) testifies to the fact that the social question by no means has fallen silent on the EU agenda. By the same token, neither has social issues ceased to make up a register of EU citizenship. Yet, what is important to keep in mind is that during the past decade, or since the launch of the Lisbon Agenda in 2000, the key watchword, and thus also the key to such a register, has not been the European Social Model as such, but rather the “reforms” to which this model by necessity must submit. It seems reasonable to argue, then, that recent referenda signal that such “reforms”—e.g., greater labor market flexibility, privatization, and overall cutbacks in social entitlements—have failed to draw sufficient popular support, thereby also preventing people from conforming to the prescribed social register of EU citizenship.
But the EU referenda in question are equally interesting to explore for what they make less explicit with regards to the question of citizenship. Anyone just vaguely acquainted with EU politics will know of the enormous attention it has come to pay to the question of migration in recent years. To the “problems” of “illegal immigration” and asylum seekers, to the need for more labor migrants from third countries in order to ensure economic growth and to alleviate the Union’s demographic deficit and to the migrant integration challenges faced by EU societies, particularly as concerns the growing Muslim minority. As already noted above, moreover, the question of third-country migration has also come to occupy central stage in EU citizenship policy in recent years. And here things get really convoluted. Because if we juxtapose the registers of EU citizenship that came to the fore in the elite reactions to the No votes in the Dutch, French, and Irish referenda with those registers of EU citizenship conveyed by EU migration policy, we encounter a number of startling contradictions. What we encounter, then, is an inversion of citizenship registers of sorts. That is to say, many of those deplorable attitudes, particularly with regards to migration, that are said to be typical of No voters in EU referenda are to no insignificant extent recast as legitimate attitudes when it comes to EU migration policy.
In fact, it is by adopting a migration policy commensurate with such negative attitudes toward migration that the EU, since the late 1980s, is hoping to convert its migration policy into a concrete and indeed popularly legitimate manifestation of citizenship policy. As the EU’s chief decision-making body, the Council of Ministers (or formally the Council of the European Union) puts it: “In order to meet the expectations of its citizens the European Union must respond to the security threats of terrorism and organised crime, and to the challenge of managing migration flows” (Council of the European Union 2005: 1; henceforward abbreviated as Council EU). Similarly, the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, holds that an “effective common management of the external borders of the Member States of the Union will boost security and the citizen’s sense of belonging to a shared area and destiny. It also serves to secure continuity in the action undertaken to combat terrorism, illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings” (CEC 2002a: 2). Furthermore, as our subsequent analysis will show, the EU citizen whom the European Commission has tasked itself to serve is also a citizen said to be greatly in favor of more stringent asylum rules combined with an increase of forced deportations of rejected asylum seekers. We could also add that the Commission has promised EU citizens to pursue a tougher approach to migrant integration, in general, and toward Muslims, in particular. As the EU’s Commissioner in charge of migration and citizenship matters (also Vice-President of the European Commission) brusquely remarked in 2006: “We are not governed by sharia, after all” (quoted in Kubosova 2006a).
However, and to introduce yet another layer of contradictions, we should also emphasize that the European Commission on other occasions, particularly within the framework of the EU’s anti-discrimination policy, is very eager to promote intercultural understanding and tolerance towards migrants and Muslims. To some extent the same applies whenever the issue of the Union’s professedly enormous economic and demographic need for labor migrants is on the agenda. In this context, often prefaced with references to the Lisbon Agenda’s grave warnings concerning the detrimental impact on economic growth should the Union fail to meet this need, the Commission urges EU citizens to adopt a positive attitude to new labor migration in exchange for Brussels’ promise to adopt an even more relentless attitude towards “illegal immigration.”
To broaden the contradictory picture a bit further, let’s also bring in some illustrations from the national level. Take, for instance, the whole fuss about the “Polish plumber” and the allegations that No voters were motivated by negative attitudes toward labor migration from the new eastern members. Now, if the political establishment really believed that to have been the case, we must also ask why governments across the old EU did not take the opportunity to rejoice instead, crediting themselves for having succeeded in persuading public opinion as to the merits of restrictions on labor migration from the new member states. After all, these restrictions, or “transition rules,” which barred the new members’ citizens from enjoyment of the EU citizenship’s most esteemed right—i.e., “free movement” of labor—that practically all of the fifteen old members had imposed just the year before the Franco-Dutch referenda, were to no minor extent justified under the pretext of protecting citizens from being swamped by wage dumpers and welfare scroungers from the new member states. In other words, the transition rules were imposed for the alleged reason of protecting citizens from the same Polish plumber whom EU governments a year later were to soak in crocodile tears.
An equally paradoxical picture unfolds when we turn, finally, to the sweeping charges of intolerance and murky nationalism made against No voters in EU referenda. It is interesting to note that the same Dutch government who scolded No voters for having forgotten about Auschwitz and for fueling a dangerous “Balkanization” of Europe, at the same time had its hands full with developing compulsory so-called integration tests for the purpose of inculcating certain migrant groups, particularly Muslims, with allegedly superior Dutch national values. Here, the ruling Christian Democrats promised voters that migrants, among other things, were to be forced to learn the national anthem by heart (BBC News, 16 May 2002). Dutch and French governments branding No voters as nationalist and xenophobic were thus, in effect, contradicting their own long-standing xenophobic and anti-Muslim agendas. “Like it or not,” said President Chirac in 2003, “wearing a veil is a kind of aggression” (quoted in Scott 2007: 84). Right before the Irish referenda, moreover, similar statements about Muslims could be heard from the Yes camp there, the Labour Party’s education spokesman declaring: “Nobody is formally asking them [the Muslims] to come here. In the interest of integration and assimilation, they should embrace our culture” (quoted in McDonagh 2008). As part of a new brand of migrant and minority integration policy at both national and EU levels—something we scrutinize in detail further on—messages such as these have become increasingly common in recent years, giving rise to ever more exclusive and ethno-culturally articulated notions of national and European citizenships.
Grasping the Politics of EU Citizenship: Aims and Approach
Above we have pointed to the centrality of the interrelated matters of political economy, social rights, and migration for our grasp of the content, registers, and purpose of EU citizenship. Not least have our illustrations from the messy world of EU referenda sought to give a glimpse of how these matters impinge upon the huge stakes and hefty contradictions that are involved in the struggles over EU citizenship. But if this somewhat impressionistic picture that we have painted so far tries to speak to the urgency involved in the current politics of European citizenship, it has also tried to show that in order to grasp this politics we need to situate it in a historical context. Before we turn our attention to these tasks in the chapters ahead, however, we need to specify our aims, approach, and research questions in more precise terms.
The overall purpose of this book is to critically conceptualize and analyze the historical development of EU citizenship as it has developed alongside the deepening cleavage between the power of EU institutions on the one hand and popular legitimacy among its citizenry on the other; charting its long-range movements vis-à-vis the broader transformations of the EU integration project. We stress that although formal legal EU citizenship was only introduced in 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty, what we term a “de facto transnational citizenship regime” has existed at least since the establishment of the European Economic Community (1957), and can even be traced to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), and its legal provisions for intra-EU labor mobility (see Maas 2005).
Grounded in the tradition of critical political economy (see van Apeldoorn, Drahokoupil and Horn 2008), the approach developed here identifies and illuminates the historically contingent political struggles that shape citizenship politics in the EU. More specifically, our approach sets out to uncover the relations of power underpinning the EU as a historically specific capitalist social formation, to determine how these relations shape the trajectories of the integration project and its concomitant citizenship model (see Chapter 1; van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner 2003). The central premise guiding this approach is that in order to understand and explain the limits of EU citizenship in securing legitimacy, we need to examine its “social purpose,” attempting not only to normatively assess or to describe the institutional form of EU citizenship, but also to uncover its socioeconomic content by explaining who benefits from it and what kind of citizenship model it seeks to promote (Holman 2004; van Apeldoorn 2002; Hager 2008). Uncovering this social purpose, we argue, requires an empirically thick, historical account that is careful not to isolate EU citizenship from the historical dynamics of the broader integration project from which it stems. As we seek to motivate throughout the book, such an account—which anchors the study of EU citizenship in an empirically sustained critical-historical framework—is glaringly absent from the extensive current literature on the subject.
The three central and interrelated research questions guiding the development of our conceptual framework, and employed in our subsequent empirical analysis can be briefly summarized as follows:
1.) How have the politics or “social purpose” of EU citizenship transformed over time? How do we explain this historical transformation?
2.) What are the particular configurations of social and political forces that shape the form and content of EU citizenship in any given historical period?
3.) What are the specific structural barriers or limitations within citizenship practices that help account for the EU’s deepening crisis of legitimacy?
In outlining these specific aims, we should also be careful to explicitly delimit our analysis; to outline from the beginning what our book is not trying to cover. Firstly, this is not a book replete with citizenship and migration policy recommendations. As we will describe more fully in our theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1, our critical approach attempts to stand back from the existing literature’s fixation with policy prescription and endorsement, to uncover historically the social power relations underpinning citizenship politics in the EU. This does not mean that we accept a separation of theory and practice, but rather that the political practice we envision is not limited to given formal institutional structures. As is implied in critical analysis, the radical nature of the knowledge offered in this book is more likely to inform the political practices that go beyond mere policy recommendations to EU institutions. Second, this is not a book that engages systematically with quantitative data on migration. We do undoubtedly make reference to this data to back up our arguments in empirical analysis, yet this is by no means our focal point. This data is readily available in the EU documents we cite and also in some of our existing works (see Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). In all, we feel strongly that this book is venturing into the relatively uncharted territory of critical political economy analysis in the realm of EU citizenship studies. As an exploratory exercise, we hope that our analysis will pave the way for more specific engagement with various facets of citizenship politics, including critical analysis of the relationship between EU and the various national citizenship regimes.
The Outline of the Book
In terms of expositional structure, the book is divided into two parts. We begin in Part I by both theoretically anchoring and historically contextualizing our analysis of citizenship politics in the EU. Chapter 1 systematically outlines our alternative theoretical approach to EU citizenship—a “critical history”—which in shorthand refers to our application of insights from critical political economy to the analysis of EU citizenship from a long-term historical perspective. Here we set out to qualify further our point of departure in the social purpose of EU citizenship: firstly by critiquing existing approaches to EU citizenship for their narrow foci on normative prescription or institutional problem solving; and secondly by developing a conceptual apparatus that examines how the historically contingent asymmetrical power relations engendered by capitalist market structures shape and transform citizenship politics in both its form and content.
The remainder of Part I traces the historical development of EU citizenship over the second half of the twentieth century. The historical background provided in these chapters establishes a foundation for understanding the current state of affairs in EU citizenship policy, first and foremost by dispelling a prevailing misconception that a specifically supranational citizenship politics have only existed since the Maastricht Treaty’s introduction of a formal EU citizenship category in 1993.
In Chapter 2 we analyze the struggles to implement substantive pan-European citizenship rights, including social rights, to facilitate intra-EU labor migration and thus labor mobility in line with imperatives of economic growth during the postwar embedded liberal period (see Ruggie 1982). The de facto transnational citizenship regime that emerged through these dynamics, we argue, highlights the fact that migration policy has been central to EU citizenship policy from the very outset of the integration project, while the regime’s rigid exclusion of third-country nationals (TCNs) from citizenship provisions marked the creation of a dualized citizenship order that remains at the heart of EU citizenship politics to this day.
Chapter 3 focuses on the transformations in EU citizenship policy during the Single Market induced “relaunch” of the integration project from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. We argue that the introduction of the EU’s own formal citizenship model in the Maastricht Treaty was bound up with the ideological re-orientation of the EU toward “embedded neo-liberalism” (see van Apeldoorn 2002) and the domination of the Single Market project’s “market making” negative integration; a contradictory combination attempting to embed market forces within a limited social-institutional framework (e.g., welfare policy, research and development, education and skills training) (van Apeldoorn 2003a). This was the case insofar as EU citizenship was itself based on neoliberal precepts of the individualized “market citizen.” Crucially, however, we show that the “socially thin” market citizenship model was also underpinned by an exclusivist “ethno-cultural” dimension emphasizing the (Judeo-Christian) civilizational, cultural, and religious facets of a European identity that Brussels took great pains to promote as part of its new European citizenship policy. In consequence of the Single Market, external migration also emerged as a common European “problem,” calling for common action and solutions that increasingly were to couch migration in terms of control, security and crime. The securitization and criminalization of the migration problématique during the relaunch—motivated as part of a greater concern to “protect” EU citizens against new external as well as internal threats—can be regarded as another component in the EU’s attempt to compensate for the absence of supranational social rights; a move that furthermore served to bolster the dualized order of EU citizenship policy discussed in Chapter 2.
Part II of the book focuses on the citizenship politics in the contemporary context of the Lisbon Strategy, the ambitious strategic blueprint launched in 2000 seeking to transform the EU into the most competitive knowledge-based economy (KBE) in the world by 2010. As our account moves into the contemporary scene, the analysis becomes empirically richer and more detailed, compelling us to make an empirical division between EU migration policy, on the one hand, and the EU’s more explicitly articulated, or “formal,” citizenship policy, on the other. This should be read as a practical, or pragmatic division, rather than one implying that these two main sides of citizenship politics have become analytically separated from each other. As the reader will no doubt notice, the analysis in Part II also gives more weight to migration policy. This was a conscious decision on our part rather than a case of haphazard lopsidedness: as we will seek to motivate throughout Part II, this emphasis on migration policy is necessary precisely because migration has become articulated by the EU as a key issue within its contemporary citizenship politics. Here we should emphasize that “EU migration policy” in our account refers to a complex conceptualization that bridges the commonly invoked analytical and empirical separation between the external and internal dimensions of EU migration policy. As such, we scrutinize both the external dimension of EU migration policy—as in labor migration from non-EU countries, asylum policy, and policy to prevent “illegal” or irregular immigration—on the one side, and the internal dimension—as in migrant integration policy, anti-discrimination policy, and labor migration, or “free movement” within the EU area—on the other. Moreover, by conceiving of these dimensions as analytically inseparable, this, what we may term, integrated approach provides for a discussion of causes as well as consequences of EU migration policy that accounts for the dynamic of oftentimes contradictory political and economic driving forces that are at work in the formation and execution of migration policies. Such a wide-ranging approach provides a comprehensive picture of a complex development. What is more, this approach is becoming all the time more important. Thus, as the external and internal dimensions of EU migration policy have become thoroughly interdependent, the analytical separation between the external and internal dimensions is turning out to be increasingly untenable.
The opening chapter of Part II, Chapter 4, takes on the task of uncovering how EU citizenship—particularly in terms of social citizenship—has developed since the launching of the Lisbon Strategy (2000–2010). Considered by many to have ushered in a new era for the integration project, the Lisbon Strategy is analyzed in detail in order to determine to which extent it actually deviates from the “embedded neoliberal” hegemonic order and socially thin market citizenship model of the relaunch era. We argue that contrary to some enthusiastic academic and political assessments, the Lisbon Strategy does not mark a “positive” turning point for EU-level social citizenship, but instead remains firmly grounded within the framework of embedded neoliberalism. Yet the novelty of the Lisbon Strategy as it relates to social citizenship is that it focuses almost solely on citizen responsibilities or duties to make themselves employable in light of the inevitable restructuring involved in the transition to a globally competitive KBE. We go on to explain how this has been further intensified since the shift in early 2005 to a streamlined “growth and jobs” agenda under the Commission headed by José Manuel Barroso.
In Chapters 5 and 6 we return to EU migration policy as it unfolds in the areas of migrant integration and anti-discrimination policy, extra-EU labor migration policy, asylum policy, and EU policy to fight so-called illegal immigration; current EU estimates put the number of “illegal” (or irregular) migrants in the EU-25 at about 8 million.4 Chapter 5 concerns itself with the developments in migration policy under the auspices of the EU’s Tampere Program (1999–2004), while Chapter 6 deals with Tampere’s multi-annual successor agenda, the Hague Program (2005–10). Both of these chapters examine the contradictory interplay between internally and externally directed supranational initiatives within the broad field of EU migration policy. Here, we put stress on what we identify as growing tensions between the EU’s agenda to crack down on “illegal” immigration and “bogus” asylum seeking, and to toughen measures aimed at migrant “integration,” on the one hand, and on the other hand the EU’s simultaneous promises to base EU asylum policy on humanitarian values, to combat migrants’ social exclusion and to institute vigorous measures to fight racism and discrimination. As part of this we discuss the implications of the EU’s developing migration policy for the issue of EU citizenship, in general, and for the prospects of migrants’ access to social rights in the EU, in particular.
Finally, the Conclusion offers a synthesized treatment of the book’s empirical analysis by summarizing the various power relations that have underpinned citizenship politics over the more than half century old history of the EU project. We then return to a discussion of the post-referenda dynamics of EU integration that we started in this introductory chapter, reflecting on the implications that the EU’s current crisis of legitimacy have for the current configuration of power asymmetries that underpin citizenship politics. We conclude the book with a brief discussion of what constitutes the “model” or “ideal” EU citizen in the eyes of social and political forces at the heart of the integration project.
Notes
1. For detailed accounts of the efforts to secure popular support and legitimacy for European integration following in the wake of the Single Market transformations, see e.g. Hansen (2000); Shore (2000); Scott-Smith (2003); Martiniello (1995).
2. As was stipulated in the Maastricht Treaty (EC Treaty, Part Two, Article 8(1)), “Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union”. The rights provided by the “Citizenship of the Union” include, inter alia, “the right to move and reside within the territory of the Member States”; “the right to vote and to stand as a candidate” at municipal and European Parliament elections for residents in a member state other than the one where they are nationals; expanded diplomatic and consular protection; and “the right to petition the European Parliament” and to “apply to the Ombudsman” (Council of the European Communities, CEC 1992).
3. For a substantiation of this point, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the referenda, see Watkins (2005).
4. See CEC (2008a: 6). For more comprehensive EU migration statistics, covering both irregular and regular migration, see CEC (2008a: Annex 4). See also e.g. Eurostat (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/population/introduction); OECD (http://www.oecd.org/topic/0,3373,en_2649_37415_1_1_1_1_37415,00.html); and International Organization for Migration (IOM) (http://www.iom.int/jahia/jsp/index.jsp).
