This article situates the phenomenon of visible begging in the context of the welfare state, exploring the relationship between welfare institutions and social marginalisation. Combining survey data with 26 interviews, the article explores what Swedes think about the proposal to ban begging. The results confirm earlier studies emphasising the norms of egalitarianism and insider privilege in universal welfare states. However, the results identify pragmatism, non-materialist egalitarianism, and non-coercion as complementary frames in individual reasoning about begging. Finally, the results indicate a blurred distinction between vulnerability and deviance in reasoning about begging, nuancing previous ideas about social policy preferences.

One of the defining features of contemporary Europe is the freedom of movement of persons. Despite its advantages, this ‘freedom of movement’ is also contested, since it has been shown to cause discrimination, exploitation and pave the way for a ‘race to the bottom’. How can we understand the social-economic consequences of free movement in Europe? To answer this question, we developed a typology along the dimensions value of work and degree of power which delivers four ideal types of labour relationships: exploitative, deprived, greedy and esteemed. This has been applied to Central and Eastern European (CEE) workers in Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden.Our study shows dual labour market strategies of both capital and labour agents, using on the one hand strategies of cost minimisation, and on the other hand compliance strategies and dual frames of reference, both of which contribute to a low degree of freedom and a low value of work. It addresses the responsibility and significance of both capital and labour contributing to exploitative and greedy relationships throughout all three cases. The results contribute to a more balanced understanding of the responsibilities towards the ‘shadow sides’ of free movement in the EU, as it shows that not all free movement of persons is totally free. Moreover, instead of bold political statements, it demonstrates the relevance of a more differentiated perspective on the downsides and benefits of European free movement.

The article provides an analysis of policy responses to mobile EU citizens without legal residence in the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden. A comparative case study design uses qualitative survey and interview data to identify national and local policy responses to the implications of EU citizens from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) living without legal residence in the aforementioned countries. The theoretical framework specifies how the institutional logic of welfare regimes is likely to generate policy responses that address need, sanction informality or do both. The choice indicates the priority given to redistributive outcomes, administrative procedures, or both. The results reveal similar responses to those implications relating to the labour market, but slightly different approaches to the implications in the social domain. Policy responses to labour market implications have predominantly focused on sanctioning informality. Swedish and Austrian policy responses in the social domain have focused on addressing need. Dutch policy responses to social issues instead focused on sanctioning informality, prioritizing procedure. The results indicate that local and national policy responses to implications of informal intra-EU migration may be fruitfully understood through the prism of welfare regimes and related approaches to need and informality.ARTICLE HISTORY

Free movement management is a challenge that emerged in a multi-level context, with policies developed at one level having unclear implications for actors working at other levels, and with questions of authority and competencies remaining highly uncertain. Broader issues of national and local contexts, as well as traditional institutional practices, all lay the groundwork for the need of clearly articulated governance solutions. As is clear from previous chapters, the flows of CEE migrants, as well as the social consequences of their presence in urban regions that are often unequipped in both policy and administrative terms, has led to substantial challenges for actors at all levels of government, both public and private, when it comes to free movement management.In this chapter, we identify the specific governance patterns that have emerged in terms of free movement management. Our argument is that while free movement management may have emerged in a multi-level context, there is a surprising lack of multi-level governance when it comes to policy and administrative responses. Put bluntly, the governance measures that have been opted for in each of the four nations and eight cities display strikingly little in the way of multi-level governance. Rather, for the policy domains that have been most salient in each setting, we see that the governance solutions that have been institutionalized primarily represent either horizontal, top-down, or multiple-level modes of governance. Quite simply, with rare exceptions, the governance modes that have been adopted are not governance modes that meaningfully involve the EU. These empirical findings suggest that a political challenge that would have all the hallmarks of an opportunity for vertical governance networks to emerge is, at the end of the day, largely being resolved by actors at local levels.

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