Regimes of EU Citizenship and Intra-EU Migration
In the Treaty of Rome, labor migration was assigned an important function. This partly grew out of the assessments made in The Brussels Report on the General Common Market from 1956—or the Spaak Report, named after the Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak, who was its author and principal instigator. The report, which made up the chief preparatory work for the Rome Treaty and the design of the European Economic Community (EEC), made it clear that labor migration formed part of the EEC’s elementary logic, a necessary precondition for an association built on “free competition” (Maas 2005: 1019). A large market and competitive production, it was argued, did not only require facilitated mobility for the interchange of goods, capital, and services; it also required access to a mobile labor force. Imbalances on the Community’s labor market such as when one member state was unable to supply its growth industries with enough labor, or labor with sufficient skills, would in this way be resolved by having the member state in need gain access to labor from the other members. In theory, the allocation gains reaped from enhanced labor mobility also implied that unemployment in one region of the Community and labor shortage in another were to balance each other out in a way beneficial to both regions. The mobility of the factors of production (in this case labor) in the six member states was no longer to be constrained by national borders; instead, it was to be extended in order to benefit the entire transnational common market and enlarged production base that the integration project intended to create. Important to keep in mind, though, is that this by no means entailed a transfer of national labor market and migration policies to the supranational level. However, since migration policy as regarded the intra-EEC movement of workers was subjected to such a transfer, this change did, indirectly, involve a certain supranational influence on labor market policy. But this was as far as the member states were ready to go at this point (Romero 1993).
The Rome Treaty’s labor mobility provisions originated in the Treaty of Paris (1951) and its institution of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (Maas 2005). Through persistent pressure from the Italian government, the ECSC opened up for the free movement of qualified coal and steelworkers. Italy saw itself suffering from an acute problem of overpopulation and was, therefore, very anxious to secure means for emigration in order to, as the expression often goes, export its surplus population, and, with it, its unemployment problem. This also constituted one of the main reasons behind the Italian support for and participation in postwar European integration (Willis 1971).
Italian unemployment problems also influenced the Rome Treaty’s institution of free movement for labor. This time, however, the other five signatories were also in favor of more open intra-EEC labor migration. But for them, and in contrast to Italy, it was labor shortage, rather than unemployment, that prompted their approval. The five other members, and West Germany in particular—now the emerging economic motor of Western Europe—had difficulties in meeting the 1950’s great labor demand on their own, and thus saw free movement of labor as a means to amend the problem (Collins 1975: 13). The motives are clearly mirrored in the migration statistics for the years immediately following the ratification of the Treaty of Rome, where Italian workers made up over half of all labor migrants admitted in the Community countries, while less than two fifths came from countries outside of the EEC. In the beginning of the 1960s, almost half of West Germany’s labor migrants came from Italy (Ascoli 1985: 186–7).
Free movement of labor within the EEC was not introduced over night at the ratification of the Treaty of Rome in 1958, but would be gradually implemented during the 1960s. More precisely, free movement meant that citizens in the member states were given the same rights and opportunities to seek and acquire work in the Community as a whole. Citizens in one member state were entitled to travel to another member state to accept an employment offer; and they were entitled to stay on in that country after the employment had been concluded. Exceptions were made for employment in the civil service, e.g., the police, military, taxation authorities, government, and the court system. Over and above that, member states were also permitted to restrict the free movement in cases where it was judged to compromise law and order, public safety, and health (see Weiss and Wooldridge 2002).
The work to implement the free movement was carried out in different stages during the 1960s and was completed (tentatively) through legislative decision by the Council of Ministers in 1968 (Council EC 1968a, 1968b). This took place at the same time as the Customs Union was completed, which also had been gradually implemented. 1968 thus marks an important date in EU history; two of the Treaty of Rome’s most important transitional goals were now completed. The work to develop, expand, and improve the rights tied to free movement did not stop in 1968, however, but was to continue during the 1970s, and has done so ever since. Hence, even today free movement is not fully accomplished. In fact, the introduction of the so-called transition rules that all old member states (except for Sweden2) imposed on the ten new members in 2004 and the two new ones in 2007, and which substantially limit the right of free labor movement for the new EU citizens, inflicted a major blow to free movement, both as a principle and practice. But also citizens of the old member states are still met by certain obstacles when they move, work and settle across borders within the EU (see Baldoni 2003). Even if one disregards the transition arrangements, then, free movement—in the sense of denoting the total equality of rights (and thus the total absence of discrimination based on nationality) between the intra-EU migrants and the citizens of the member state to which they migrate—is still not fully implemented, but even now subjected to some restrictions. The phasing out of such lingering restrictions, as we will discuss further in the next chapter, has been one of the primary aims of the EU’s formal citizenship regime ever since its inception in the early 1990s.
Returning to the historical development, it is important to remember that the implementation and development of the free movement provisions implied so much more than a catalogue of formal rights and prohibitions against one member state’s labor market discriminating against another member’s citizens on grounds of nationality. In order to stimulate transnational labor mobility and create incentives for labor to work across borders in the Community, it also became necessary to ensure that such migration entailed a set of substantial rights. As we shall see below, the labor migration occurring within the regime of free movement was therefore also to become equipped with an accentuated social welfare dimension.
Migration Policy as Transnational Social Citizenship
When we speak of the EU’s social and welfare policy it must be kept in mind that, from the very outset, such EU policy has differed markedly from its national counterparts in the member states. EU competence within social policy was, and still is, very limited and has for the most part consisted of general policy statements lacking binding legal force (see Hix 1999: 226–30). The Treaty of Rome, for instance, emphasized the importance to work for improved living standards and