Community institutions. As a consequence, intergovernmental arrangements were ruled out as unable to deal with “our collective needs” and the future social dilemmas of economic and corporate transnationalization (Tindemans 1976: 26, 29).
Community Citizenship and Migration
In conjunction with these developments, there were also some tentative signs that issues pertaining to external migration and resident TCNs were beginning to receive some consideration at the Community level. The growing attention being directed at social welfare and citizenship can thus be said to have been conducive to bringing also the situation for external migrants on the supranational agenda—and this for the very first time. The matter was not only touched upon in the 1974 Social Action Program; that same year the Commission also presented a proposal for an action program exclusively focusing on the question of migration, entitled “Action Program in favour of migrant workers and their families” (CEC 1976 [1974]). It should be said that the program chiefly focused on the situation for internal, free moving migrants, whom at this moment still were spoken of and categorized as migrants. But also external migrants, and particularly those domiciled, were given quite some consideration.
By discussing the situation for internal and external migrants in the same breath, the Commission also put the finger on what it took to be an ever more problematic and embarrassing division within the Community between two groups of migrants; two groups who despite being bound by basically the same obligations nonetheless lived under very different and unequal circumstances when it came to the enjoyment of rights and freedoms. As noted by the Commission (1976 [1974]: 14) at the time: “[T]he legal situation of migrant workers coming from third countries depends on the status accorded to them by the host country. . . . The result is that migrant workers from third countries are generally treated less favourably than workers coming from the Member States, and the situation of these third country migrants varies considerably from one country to another.” Furthermore:
[T]he social conditions of the migrant do indeed give cause for serious concern—especially in the case of third country migrants, who have no Community protection and rely solely on often restrictive national legislation . . . For this reason solutions in common must be found, not only to the problems of Community migrants but also for those from third countries. These solutions must take account of the migrant workers’ needs and their rightful place in a society to whose prosperity and well-being they contribute. As the migrant population increases, and they remain longer in the Community, so their interests in the affluent society around them increases and their sense of exclusion from it can become more acute. (CEC 1976 [1974]: 12)
On this view, the Commission called for measures to improve migrants’ lot in general, and to gradually phase out the discrepancies with regard to rights and legal status between internal and external migrants. The fact, for instance, that TCNs ran an unwarranted high risk of being deported was addressed, and the Commission criticized the member states for the ways in which they were utilizing the deportation instrument. However, the Commission would not go as far as proposing that the right of free movement, and the rights and entitlements belonging to it, be granted to TCNs. Nonetheless, for its time these were still quite forcible formulations, and as is evident from the unfavourable depiction of the “restrictive” member states they also marked a certain divergence of opinion between the Commission and the member governments as concerned migration policy.
In connection with this, the Commission went on to caution that unless migrants’ predicaments were alleviated this would contribute to a climate that was conducive to a growing racism and xenophobia. Therefore, measures were needed to enhance migrants’ “integration” (this was probably the first time the term was used in the EU context) into society; and member states were asked to begin a coordination of their, among themselves, very dissimilar migration policies toward countries outside the Community. In addition, governments were requested to work out common measures to come to terms with “illegal immigration,” which the Commission saw as a large and fast growing problem. In sharp contrast to its future outlook on the matter, which we will discuss ahead, the Commission was mostly concerned about the situation for “illegals” as such: that they lived under an impending danger of being deported; had little or no access to medical care and social services; and that they were exposed to exploitation from employers (CEC 1976 [1974]: 21).
In summing up the European Commission’s work in the 1970s, we have seen that a significant portion of it was to coalesce around the question of rights, in general, and of social rights of citizenship, in particular. Firstly, the established citizenship rights for member-state citizens needed to be safeguarded, developed through the addition of rights of economic democracy, and adapted to a transforming economic environment by way of more powers and responsibilities vested at the supranational level. Secondly, albeit not formulated in these exact terms, the free movement–induced transnational citizenship for intra-Community migrants needed to be fully developed and on a par with rights of national citizenship, so as to simultaneously stimulate factor mobility and avoid migrants’ degradation to second-class citizens, a prospect that was seen as putting a break on people’s readiness to migrate. Third, and finally, the Commission had also begun to broach the issue of extra-Community migration and the problems facing TCNs; and, in addition to this, it had begun to lift the lid on the issue of “illegal immigration.” In this context most of the attention was directed at TCNs’ lack of many of the rights associated with national citizenships, on the one hand, and their exclusion from the (transnational) rights of free movement, on the other. To cite an indignant Commission yet again:
In fact, after more than a decade of benefit from migrant labour, the Community finds itself with a large unassimilated group of foreign workers, who share almost all the obligations of the society in which they live and work but, more often than not, have a less than equal share in its benefits and rights. This situation is in the long term intolerable—degrading for the migrant and dangerous for the Community. (CEC 1976 [1974]: 12)
Conclusion: Slouching Toward “Euro-pessimism”
Despite the work invested in the many initiatives by the Commission and other actors in the 1970s, the concrete outcomes would be meagre indeed; and this was true of supranational efforts in both the fields of social and migration policy (Dinan 1999: 421; Hoskyns 1996: 82–3). The European Parliament continued to push for the ideas behind the concept of a “Citizens’ Europe,” but here too the tangible results were very few, which was partly due to a reluctance on part of the Council (CEC 1993b: 5; Hoskyns 1996: 83). Over and above that, practically nothing was done to expand the supranational mandate and authorities within the policy areas at hand. Rather, member states remained in control and the Council of Ministers made sure to water down the various Community programs on social and migration policy so that they mostly would come to function as mere consultative assessments, instead of gaining binding status (see Geddes 2000a, 2000b: 157–8). Expanded supranational powers demanded that all member governments agreed to such a transfer of authority, and as the development in the 1970s was to make clear governments would prove far from inclined to set about to negotiate such a consensus (Hoskyns 1996: 80–1). With the exception of the social and migration policy belonging to free movement, these policy areas would thus remain within member state purview.
If adding to this that the member states also thwarted Community efforts to expand the supranational mandate within economic policy, we can sense why the development from the mid-1970s and onward often is described as a period marked by “Euro-pessimism,” “Eurosclerosis,” and Community stagnation (Dinan 1999: 57–80). The picture gets accentuated by the fact that the supranational level was denied any instruments able to mitigate the consequences of the economic downturn and crisis whose full effects would not become visible until the latter part of the 1970s (Williams 1994: 5). In retrospect, therefore, the Paris European Council in 1972 represented a set of delusive hopes for those forces advocating more of supranational influence over measures to remedy weak economic growth, high unemployment, social problems, and obstacles facing extra-Community migrants. Among the many proposals and initiatives tabled by the Commission and other like-minded actors in
