the old EU did not take the opportunity to rejoice instead, crediting themselves for having succeeded in persuading public opinion as to the merits of restrictions on labor migration from the new member states. After all, these restrictions, or “transition rules,” which barred the new members’ citizens from enjoyment of the EU citizenship’s most esteemed right—i.e., “free movement” of labor—that practically all of the fifteen old members had imposed just the year before the Franco-Dutch referenda, were to no minor extent justified under the pretext of protecting citizens from being swamped by wage dumpers and welfare scroungers from the new member states. In other words, the transition rules were imposed for the alleged reason of protecting citizens from the same Polish plumber whom EU governments a year later were to soak in crocodile tears.
An equally paradoxical picture unfolds when we turn, finally, to the sweeping charges of intolerance and murky nationalism made against No voters in EU referenda. It is interesting to note that the same Dutch government who scolded No voters for having forgotten about Auschwitz and for fueling a dangerous “Balkanization” of Europe, at the same time had its hands full with developing compulsory so-called integration tests for the purpose of inculcating certain migrant groups, particularly Muslims, with allegedly superior Dutch national values. Here, the ruling Christian Democrats promised voters that migrants, among other things, were to be forced to learn the national anthem by heart (BBC News, 16 May 2002). Dutch and French governments branding No voters as nationalist and xenophobic were thus, in effect, contradicting their own long-standing xenophobic and anti-Muslim agendas. “Like it or not,” said President Chirac in 2003, “wearing a veil is a kind of aggression” (quoted in Scott 2007: 84). Right before the Irish referenda, moreover, similar statements about Muslims could be heard from the Yes camp there, the Labour Party’s education spokesman declaring: “Nobody is formally asking them [the Muslims] to come here. In the interest of integration and assimilation, they should embrace our culture” (quoted in McDonagh 2008). As part of a new brand of migrant and minority integration policy at both national and EU levels—something we scrutinize in detail further on—messages such as these have become increasingly common in recent years, giving rise to ever more exclusive and ethno-culturally articulated notions of national and European citizenships.
Grasping the Politics of EU Citizenship: Aims and Approach
Above we have pointed to the centrality of the interrelated matters of political economy, social rights, and migration for our grasp of the content, registers, and purpose of EU citizenship. Not least have our illustrations from the messy world of EU referenda sought to give a glimpse of how these matters impinge upon the huge stakes and hefty contradictions that are involved in the struggles over EU citizenship. But if this somewhat impressionistic picture that we have painted so far tries to speak to the urgency involved in the current politics of European citizenship, it has also tried to show that in order to grasp this politics we need to situate it in a historical context. Before we turn our attention to these tasks in the chapters ahead, however, we need to specify our aims, approach, and research questions in more precise terms.
The overall purpose of this book is to critically conceptualize and analyze the historical development of EU citizenship as it has developed alongside the deepening cleavage between the power of EU institutions on the one hand and popular legitimacy among its citizenry on the other; charting its long-range movements vis-à-vis the broader transformations of the EU integration project. We stress that although formal legal EU citizenship was only introduced in 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty, what we term a “de facto transnational citizenship regime” has existed at least since the establishment of the European Economic Community (1957), and can even be traced to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), and its legal provisions for intra-EU labor mobility (see Maas 2005).
Grounded in the tradition of critical political economy (see van Apeldoorn, Drahokoupil and Horn 2008), the approach developed here identifies and illuminates the historically contingent political struggles that shape citizenship politics in the EU. More specifically, our approach sets out to uncover the relations of power underpinning the EU as a historically specific capitalist social formation, to determine how these relations shape the trajectories of the integration project and its concomitant citizenship model (see Chapter 1; van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner 2003). The central premise guiding this approach is that in order to understand and explain the limits of EU citizenship in securing legitimacy, we need to examine its “social purpose,” attempting not only to normatively assess or to describe the institutional form of EU citizenship, but also to uncover its socioeconomic content by explaining who benefits from it and what kind of citizenship model it seeks to promote (Holman 2004; van Apeldoorn 2002; Hager 2008). Uncovering this social purpose, we argue, requires an empirically thick, historical account that is careful not to isolate EU citizenship from the historical dynamics of the broader integration project from which it stems. As we seek to motivate throughout the book, such an account—which anchors the study of EU citizenship in an empirically sustained critical-historical framework—is glaringly absent from the extensive current literature on the subject.
The three central and interrelated research questions guiding the development of our conceptual framework, and employed in our subsequent empirical analysis can be briefly summarized as follows:
1.) How have the politics or “social purpose” of EU citizenship transformed over time? How do we explain this historical transformation?
2.) What are the particular configurations of social and political forces that shape the form and content of EU citizenship in any given historical period?
3.) What are the specific structural barriers or limitations within citizenship practices that help account for the EU’s deepening crisis of legitimacy?
In outlining these specific aims, we should also be careful to explicitly delimit our analysis; to outline from the beginning what our book is not trying to cover. Firstly, this is not a book replete with citizenship and migration policy recommendations. As we will describe more fully in our theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1, our critical approach attempts to stand back from the existing literature’s fixation with policy prescription and endorsement, to uncover historically the social power relations underpinning citizenship politics in the EU. This does not mean that we accept a separation of theory and practice, but rather that the political practice we envision is not limited to given formal institutional structures. As is implied in critical analysis, the radical nature of the knowledge offered in this book is more likely to inform the political practices that go beyond mere policy recommendations to EU institutions. Second, this is not a book that engages systematically with quantitative data on migration. We do undoubtedly make reference to this data to back up our arguments in empirical analysis, yet this is by no means our focal point. This data is readily available in the EU documents we cite and also in some of our existing works (see Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). In all, we feel strongly that this book is venturing into the relatively uncharted territory of critical political economy analysis in the realm of EU citizenship studies. As an exploratory exercise, we hope that our analysis will pave the way for more specific engagement with various facets of citizenship politics, including critical analysis of the relationship between EU and the various national citizenship regimes.
The Outline of the Book
In terms of expositional structure, the book is divided into two parts. We begin in Part I by both theoretically anchoring and historically contextualizing our analysis of citizenship politics in the EU. Chapter 1 systematically outlines our alternative theoretical approach to EU citizenship—a “critical history”—which in shorthand refers to our application of insights from critical political economy to the analysis of EU citizenship from a long-term historical perspective. Here we set out to qualify further our point of departure in the social purpose of EU citizenship: firstly by critiquing
