EU membership. True, such sentiments did exist among those voting No—as they did exist among those voting Yes (see e.g. Hainsworth 2006). But the allegation that virulent xenophobia, racism, and the like had a significant impact on the solid majority of the No voters—made up of leftists and greens in both France and the Netherlands—was at best the cry of a sore loser.3 Above all, what these accusations in effect served to achieve was to relocate the referenda beyond the pale of liberal democracy. Like in previous and subsequent ones, the referenda were rather cast as inverted votes of moral confidence; instead of respecting citizens’ free political choice to decide whether or not they had confidence in the proposal put before them, it was governments, Brussels, and scores of pundits, intellectuals, and corporate voices who, in the end, decided to declare the great majority of voters morally incapacitated. Accordingly, you were either with the enlightened (some would say cosmopolitan) Europeans, or you were with the bigoted nationalists.
In essence, such was also the message from Jürgen Habermas—European post-nationalism’s most renowned interpreter—who, together with a group of other intellectuals, called on voters to do the right thing and vote Yes: “We owe it to the millions and millions of victims of our senseless wars and criminal dictatorships” (quoted in Watkins 2005: 7). “If we look at Auschwitz,” said the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, “we know why we must accept the European Constitution” (quoted in European Citizen Action Service 2006: 14). First vice president of the European Commission, Margot Wallström, issued a similar admonition when advocating a Yes in a speech in the former Jewish ghetto of Terezin. As if this was not enough, the Dutch minister for justice went on to warn that naysayers were paving the way for “Balkanization” and war in Europe (Watkins 2005).
Such were the elite reactions to allegedly anti-European votes that, as borne out by numerous polls, after all just bore the stamp of an old arch-European tradition that refuses to call it quits; in reality, that is, they were reactions to votes largely anchored in class politics and mundane socioeconomic issues. Besides low-income constituencies and allies of the political left, however, also the young and women voted strongly against the treaty. Apparently, a treaty giving no indications of trying to dilute the long-standing EU formula of neoliberal “market making” for the benefit of welfare and social rights protection proved the wrong recipe for the types of socioeconomic problems that large cohorts within the No camp were addressing. And we should like to note that there were a few voices from within the moderate Yes camp that eventually came around to concede this banal point. Although reproaching No voters for “nationalist” and “isolationist thinking,” even a couple of hardliners could be heard echoing the self-evident; said Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens (2005): “We know that the ‘no’ votes in France and the Netherlands were motivated substantially by social and economic anxieties.”
In no uncertain terms, then, the referenda evince that when people fail to comply with the political-economic register of European citizenship, as laid down in the EU’s Lisbon Agenda/Lisbon Strategy (adopted in 2000 and distinct from the 2009 Lisbon treaty), they are promptly vilified as intolerant nationalists, anti-immigration, ignorant, selfish, and so on. To have qualms about the political economic orientation of European integration, and thus being in favour of setting the EU onto a different political economic course, more attuned to social welfare objectives, are consequently positions that are relegated from serious consideration on the EU agenda. As we shall discuss in some detail ahead, however, such has not always been the case. Well into the 1990s, calls to dilute neoliberal orthodoxy could be heard from the highest levels of the EU. Also today, as we shall examine at length as well, the EU’s pledge to respect the “European Social Model” (ESM) testifies to the fact that the social question by no means has fallen silent on the EU agenda. By the same token, neither has social issues ceased to make up a register of EU citizenship. Yet, what is important to keep in mind is that during the past decade, or since the launch of the Lisbon Agenda in 2000, the key watchword, and thus also the key to such a register, has not been the European Social Model as such, but rather the “reforms” to which this model by necessity must submit. It seems reasonable to argue, then, that recent referenda signal that such “reforms”—e.g., greater labor market flexibility, privatization, and overall cutbacks in social entitlements—have failed to draw sufficient popular support, thereby also preventing people from conforming to the prescribed social register of EU citizenship.
But the EU referenda in question are equally interesting to explore for what they make less explicit with regards to the question of citizenship. Anyone just vaguely acquainted with EU politics will know of the enormous attention it has come to pay to the question of migration in recent years. To the “problems” of “illegal immigration” and asylum seekers, to the need for more labor migrants from third countries in order to ensure economic growth and to alleviate the Union’s demographic deficit and to the migrant integration challenges faced by EU societies, particularly as concerns the growing Muslim minority. As already noted above, moreover, the question of third-country migration has also come to occupy central stage in EU citizenship policy in recent years. And here things get really convoluted. Because if we juxtapose the registers of EU citizenship that came to the fore in the elite reactions to the No votes in the Dutch, French, and Irish referenda with those registers of EU citizenship conveyed by EU migration policy, we encounter a number of startling contradictions. What we encounter, then, is an inversion of citizenship registers of sorts. That is to say, many of those deplorable attitudes, particularly with regards to migration, that are said to be typical of No voters in EU referenda are to no insignificant extent recast as legitimate attitudes when it comes to EU migration policy.
In fact, it is by adopting a migration policy commensurate with such negative attitudes toward migration that the EU, since the late 1980s, is hoping to convert its migration policy into a concrete and indeed popularly legitimate manifestation of citizenship policy. As the EU’s chief decision-making body, the Council of Ministers (or formally the Council of the European Union) puts it: “In order to meet the expectations of its citizens the European Union must respond to the security threats of terrorism and organised crime, and to the challenge of managing migration flows” (Council of the European Union 2005: 1; henceforward abbreviated as Council EU). Similarly, the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, holds that an “effective common management of the external borders of the Member States of the Union will boost security and the citizen’s sense of belonging to a shared area and destiny. It also serves to secure continuity in the action undertaken to combat terrorism, illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings” (CEC 2002a: 2). Furthermore, as our subsequent analysis will show, the EU citizen whom the European Commission has tasked itself to serve is also a citizen said to be greatly in favor of more stringent asylum rules combined with an increase of forced deportations of rejected asylum seekers. We could also add that the Commission has promised EU citizens to pursue a tougher approach to migrant integration, in general, and toward Muslims, in particular. As the EU’s Commissioner in charge of migration and citizenship matters (also Vice-President of the European Commission) brusquely remarked in 2006: “We are not governed by sharia, after all” (quoted in Kubosova 2006a).
However, and to introduce yet another layer of contradictions, we should also emphasize that the European Commission on other occasions, particularly within the framework of the EU’s anti-discrimination policy, is very eager to promote intercultural understanding and tolerance towards migrants and Muslims. To some extent the same applies whenever the issue of the Union’s professedly enormous economic and demographic need for labor migrants is on the agenda. In this context, often prefaced with references to the Lisbon Agenda’s grave warnings concerning the detrimental impact on economic growth should the Union fail to meet this need, the Commission urges EU citizens to adopt a positive attitude to new labor migration in exchange for Brussels’ promise to adopt an even more relentless attitude towards “illegal immigration.”
To broaden the contradictory picture a bit further, let’s also bring in some illustrations from the national level. Take, for instance, the whole fuss about the “Polish plumber” and the allegations that No voters were motivated by negative attitudes toward labor migration from the new eastern members. Now, if the political establishment really believed
