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
