arenas of governance (van Apeldoorn and Horn 2007). Thus far however, this account does not give us much indication as to how our alternative approach differs from the predominant PNC and MLG conceptions of the EU polity. We depart from these conceptions by suggesting that although the institutional setup of the EU is distinct from the state in many ways, it still fulfils the same role as a site of accumulation and competing class interests, contained within a hybrid EU state/civil society complex. As in the case of state citizenship outlined above, EU citizenship also acts as a mode of social regulation, this time within the EU polity, creating “new and compatible social identities to match the European social body” (Scott-Smith 2003: 261) while attempting to legitimate configurations of power relations that underpin EU policy making and governance.
Taken as a whole, we argue that this alternative critical history equips us with the conceptual tools for explaining the historical emergence and movement of the politics of citizenship in the EU, with the overall aim of elucidating its underlying social purpose. As a result, we do not seek to merely describe the current state of EU citizenship and endorse it as a route to a more progressive world order (in the case of PNC) nor to propose narrow problem-solving solutions that portend to modify EU citizenship in ways that make it into a mechanism for the legitimation of EU policy making and governance (as in MLG). Given the current crisis of EU legitimacy, we feel there is a dire need for social scientific research that instead directs its energies toward uncovering the limits and contradictions of EU citizenship from a historical perspective. Ultimately, the overall efficacy of the alternative problématique and underlying theoretical assumptions sketched here to sustain it can only be assessed based on how well the empirically thick historical account they buttress can capture the dynamics of citizenship politics as they have developed in the EU through more than half a century. It is to this task that we now turn.
Notes
1. For a key critique of PNC from within the moral philosophical tradition—one that we draw theoretical inspiration from and attempt to give empirical grounding to—see Balibar (2004).
2. We consider this conception of the nation-state within PNC to be the most common, “moderate” position, espoused by figures such as Daniele Archibugi and David Held. There is, however, a considerable divergence of thinking on the nation-state within PNC, so that it makes sense to plot differing views on a continuum ranging from moderates of a more realist bent to those with more doctrinaire outlooks, such as the one espoused by Ulrich Beck (2006: 170), who likens the nation-state to an “experimental chamber of horrors,” the one responsible for “the two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Stalinist death camps and genocides.” For a thorough delineation and critical scrutiny of the various cosmopolitan and post-national perspectives and positions, see Calhoun (2007).
3. According to Eurostat figures for 2006, there were approximately 18.5 million third-country nationals residing in the EU-25 (CEC 2007f: 3).
4. Wood’s argument thus relies on the notion that early forms of capitalist social relations relied upon market compulsion (“economic” versus “extra-economic” power) as the central mechanism through which workers are drawn into wage labor and capitalists are drawn to “maximize” profits. The dichotomy between “economic” and “extra-economic,” we argue, is blurred in the initial transition to capitalism through its reliance on violent forms of “primitive accumulation” (Marx 1976), and also with the rise of oligopolistic corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Josephson 1934).
CHAPTER 2
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
