Different Regimes of Migration and Migrants’ Unequal Rights
Despite the efforts that were invested to stimulate the labor mobility between the member states, it soon became apparent that intra-Community labor migration was far from keeping pace with the Community’s great labor demand in the 1950s and 60s. As a consequence, the majority of migrant labor would instead come and be recruited from countries outside of the EEC. To be sure, from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s intra-Community migration almost doubled in size. Yet, this increase was modest when compared to the growth of extra-Community labor migration to the EEC. Up until the early 1960s internal and external migration grew at approximately the same pace, with the former slightly ahead. Toward the end of the decade, this relationship had been entirely reversed; now the external side was supplying over 80 percent of the Community’s labor migrants (Ascoli 1985; Flanagan 1993; see also CEC 1976 [1974]).
It was thus extra-Community migrants who would fill the brunt of the great postwar demand for labor, and, by so doing, also maintain the high growth rates achieved during the period (Williams, 1994: 43). To a large extent these migrants were recruited via the member states’ different guest worker programs, and mainly came from Europe’s poorer Mediterranean countries—that is, Greece, Portugal, and Spain—and from Yugoslavia and Turkey. But this migration also bore the stamp of both colonial and neocolonial relationships, where many migrants would come from Belgian, French, and Dutch colonies and former colonies. Colonial, but soon foremost neocolonial relationships, were, in this sense, not only advantageous for the EEC in terms of trade and supply of raw materials, advantages which had been procured through the association agreements established at the outset between the EEC and member states’ colonies and former colonies (i.e. the Yaoundé, Lomé and, today, the Cotonou agreement); they were also to prove beneficial in providing the Community with a source of much needed labor (MacLaughlin, 1993).4
As noted earlier, migration from countries outside the EEC was to remain an area of national responsibility, governed and regulated by the respective governments and their, among themselves, very different and (historically) path dependent policy regimes of admission, recruitment, and incorporation (or “integration”) of migrants. A bifurcated, or dualized, system for the regulation and handling of migration to the member states was thus established almost from the outset, whereby the Community’s internal respectively external migration were to sort under different policy regimes and legal frameworks.
As it turned out, moreover, the Rome Treaty’s clause on free movement was to apply exclusively to member state citizens, thereby excluding the external migrants, or the third-country nationals (TCNs), from the right of free movement within the Community. Interestingly enough, this exclusive application was not stipulated by the treaty itself; the treaty’s articles on free movement only referred to “workers” and did not make any explicit distinction between member state citizens and TCNs (Geddes 2000a; Hoogenboom 1992; Kostakopoulou 2001). Rather, it was the member-state governments that, through legislation in the Council of Ministers in the 1960s, decided to restrict free movement to only include member-state citizens (Geddes 2000a; Hoskyns 1996: 169).5 Given the strong economic motives behind the endeavor to stimulate intra-Community labor mobility, such a curtailment is difficult to explain with reference to a simple cost-benefit calculation. We raise this in view of the fact that the inclusion of TCNs in the free movement regime clearly would have served to increase labor mobility within the Community. According to Theodora Kostakopoulou (2001: 183), the decision instead needs to be viewed in the light of an increasingly negative attitude toward migration from less well off and, most of all, non-European countries that was to take shape in the 1960s (see also Steedman 1979). Indirectly, therefore, the decision contributed to the institutionalization of a perception of who did and who did not belong to the European Community. By excluding TCNs from the free movement provisions, Kostakopoulou (2001: 184–5) goes on, the prospects were also thwarted for the institution of criteria other than nationality, or formal citizenship in a member state, for an individual’s belonging to and membership in the Community.
In addition to this, it was also decided early on that internal migrants (i.e. member-state citizens) should have preference over external migrants to employment in the Community—a rule that was upheld in the first stage completion of the free movement scheme in 1968 (Swann 1988: 161). The rule was foremost reflective of an Italian interest to facilitate as much as possible the outflow of its labor surplus to the other member states. Initially this was met with opposition from the West German government, which, owing to its large labor demand, wanted a free hand to recruit labor also from outside the Community. But since it soon became apparent that the intra-Community labor migration would come nowhere near meeting West German labor demands, Bonn’s requests were never challenged; thus, the conflicting Italian and West German interests would not have to come to a head. It should be noted though, that the Commission was a warm advocate of these preferential rights for member-state citizens, and for long it clung to a conviction that these rights would indeed impact intra-Community labor migration positively in relation to external migration (Collins 1975: 104–5, 114–5).
As we shall discuss further ahead, the dualized order is still in place, although in a slightly modified form, and since the mid-1980s its ever more conspicuous consequences have been the subject of an equally ever-growing debate (see e.g. Ireland 1996: 136).
Crisis and a Search for Alternatives
The years spanning the late 1960s to the mid-1970s are often pinpointed as the starting point for a period of structural crisis and transformation for continental Western European models of capitalism. A general economic downturn, triggered initially by skyrocketing oil prices and characterized by mounting stagflation, growing unemployment, and decreasing wage shares in national income, ignited a fierce ideological battle between monetarists and Keynesians on how to best manage the changing conditions of the West European political economy (Boyer 1990).
This battle was further complicated by the changing structural conditions of the global political economy, as continental European states were pressed to formulate policy responses to the U.S. and U.K. pole position in abandoning the international compromise of embedded liberalism through “the liberalization of independent finance from Keynesian controls” already in the late-1960s (Holman and van der Pijl 1996: 63; see also Helleiner 1994). Heightened capital mobility and the “vocabulary” of “interdependence and competitiveness” (Cox 1992: 27) that accompanied it raised uncertainties about the future sustainability of continental Europe’s models of welfare capitalism and their extensive social citizenship regimes. All in all, as Stockhammer (2005–6: 195–6) notes, it is important to emphasise that the actual effects of the crisis of the 1970s were experienced unevenly by the various social classes within Europe. The rising tide of joblessness and wage stagnation can indeed be regarded as nothing short of a crisis for Europe’s working classes; one which they have yet to recover from. But for the capitalist classes, the downturn of the 1970s is best thought of as a temporary lull in performance whereby brief and modest dips in profit incomes were soon restored to their post-war “Golden Age” levels.
The general weakening of Western Europe’s overall economic performance in this period also contributed to the activation of the Community-level as a forum for new discussions on how to meet and amend the crisis. Much of this discussion would center on social issues, on the future of welfare, and the question of citizenship (Hoskyns 1996: 79; Williams 1994: 182). The initiative also formed an integral part of an effort to increase popular support for European integration and, as it also was expressed,