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
