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
