CHAPTER 2
Introduction
Although it would take until the early 1970s before any real explicit discussion concerning a European Community citizenship was to emerge (Wiener 1998: 10–11), a very tangible, what we could term, supranational citizenship regime had been set to develop from the onset of European integration in the 1950s (see Meehan 1993). Certainly, this supra- and transnational citizenship regime was rarely perceived as such at the time. That is to say, in sharp contrast to the EU citizenship’s current image and formal status, the historical citizenship regime did not constitute a free-standing policy area but was inextricably bound up with migration policy. Hence, the emerging catalogue of transnational rights in the Community was almost exclusively conferred on one single target group, namely intra-Community labor migrants, and so derived from the EU’s migration policy regime (Koslowski 1998) that the Rome Treaty instituted in order to stimulate labor migration between the Community’s six member states. Elements of citizenship policy and migration policy were thus directly bound up with the political economic scheme devised by the Rome Treaty and the Community’s four freedoms: the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital. From the very beginning, then, migration policy at the EU level also implied a transnational citizenship policy at the EU level. In this chapter we shall remove the dust from this important historical relationship, one that often gets lost in today’s debate and scholarship on EU citizenship.
The common neglect of the historical symbiosis between supranational migration and citizenship policy owes much to the fact that contemporary scholarship tends to perceive of migration as a latecomer on the EU agenda. In Encyclopedia of the European Union (Dinan 2000: 269), for instance, where a number of scholars account for the EU’s historical trajectory, it is established that “[i]mmigration emerged as an explicit European level policy area only in the [Maastricht] Treaty on European Union,” which was ratified in 1993.1 According to this prevalent view, such tardiness is mainly attributable to the alleged fact that member states until the 1990s considered the area of migration to be wholly off-limits to any supranational competence and meddling. Migration, the story goes, was, and still is, simply too delicate of a matter for national governments to compromise, too intimately bound up with matters of borders, security, citizenship, national identity, and a host of other purportedly “sensitive” issues which are said to define the very essence of the sovereign nation-state. And although it is acknowledged that the Amsterdam Treaty (ratified in 1999) did, in fact, bring about a certain transfer of migration policy competence from the national to the supranational level, the (what we could call) sensitivity thesis stays in control and can readily claim corroboration with reference to the, after all, quite limited relocation of competence to the supranational level that has taken place in recent years. Hence, member-state governments can still be said to be to “jealously guarding” their sovereignty over migration policy vis-à-vis the EU level.
There is certainly an element of truth in this account; but it is also an account that significantly overstates and (inadvertently) misrepresents its case. Upon closer scrutiny it soon becomes obvious that the story largely earns its coherence from an erasure of the longstanding supranational migration policy of “free movement” within the EU for member state citizens. These days, free movement is thus rarely conceptualized in terms of migration and so is exempted from discussions of the larger migration policy complex in the European Union, past and present (see further Hansen 2008: Ch. 1).
This way of defining away the positively charged phenomenon of free movement—connoting, as it does, open borders and labor markets, European unity, modern economy, and, last but not least, European citizenship—from the context of migration, which in today’s political vocabulary mostly spells “problems,” is, needless to say, an even more firmly established, albeit much more premeditated, practice within the sphere of European politics and policy making. As such, it walks hand in hand with an established and steadily growing discrepancy in the way people who move across national borders are treated and represented in and by the European Union. Although referring specifically to this discrepancy’s manifestation in the Spanish case, Gunther Dietz and Belén Agrela’s (2004: 431) delineation loses none of its accuracy when applied to the situation in the EU as a whole:
The large segment of intra-European Union migrants is made statistically and politically invisible by virtue of its being excluded from official immigration data, from the discourse on migration, and from governmental integration measures. . . . Thus immigration is officially—and artificially—perceived and treated as a south-north phenomenon. The formal and legal classifications of migrants—refugees or asylum seekers, settled or temporary immigrant workers, undocumented immigrants, and so on—are combined with ethnocultural and symbolic labels that reflect an implicit ethno-religious hierarchy of “others.”
Notwithstanding the reality of national borders within the EU having been open to labor migration for member-state citizens ever since the start of European integration, and regardless of the fact that member states handed over the responsibility for such migration policy to the supranational level, today’s literature, save for a few notable exceptions (e.g. Miles 1993; Geddes 2003), persists in designating migration policy as a latecomer on the EU agenda. As Sassen (1999: 129) put in 1999: “there is still no EC immigration policy as such, nor a EC citizenship policy.” In this literature, migration policy in the EU is thus almost exclusively made to refer either to member states’ individual immigration, asylum, and migrant integration policies with regard to people from outside the Union and the OECD sphere, or to the intergovernmental cooperation on migration in the EU (e.g. Schengen). This provided, it is only when this latter and more comprehensive dimension of migration policy formally enters the supranational policy picture in the 1990s that scholars in any general sense start to perceive of a relationship between migration policy and citizenship policy at the EU level. Prior to the 1990s, current scholarship rarely detects such a relationship; it only catches one between free movement and EU citizenship.
Interestingly enough, this approach has not always been predominant. As will be evinced below, up until the late 1970s, even into the 1980s, the literature quite commonly referred to free movement as a form of migration policy and those who utilized free movement as migrants or “immigrants” (see e.g. Collins 1975). Even more so this held true for the terminology employed by EU institutions. Such historical changes of definitions and categorizations (as well as the disappearance of categorizations and inventions of new ones) of people who migrate function as telling indicators of the impact European integration has had on institutionalized and public perceptions of identity, belonging, and spatial frames of reference. In parallel with the politically driven process and project of European integration, the definitions and categories employed to describe this process are also transformed. In turn, this parallel change of signification often entails that the consequences of European integration are endorsed and made imperceptible at one fell swoop. Not too long ago, people in Sweden with Italian origin were routinely described as “immigrants.” Nowadays, this connection is rarely made in the public debate and official policy. The designation of people with Spanish origin in France, Portuguese in Belgium, or Irish in Britain point to similar cases of changing categorizations (see Miles 1993: 206–7).
Against this background, we now go on to survey and analyze the EU-level’s approach to migration, citizenship, and transnational rights during the first decades of European integration (ca. 1950–1980). As we have already demonstrated, such an account cannot confine itself to the nexus of migration and citizenship as it played out in the context of free movement. Instead, the chapter explains why the supranational influence was limited to the migration policy of free movement, whereas the member states