Commentary: A Citizenship without Social Rights? EU Freedom of Movement and Changing Access to Welfare Rights

Abstract

Despite not being grounded in the classic nation-building dynamic of citizenship identified by T.H.Marshall, EU citizenship offers social rights and welfare protection to non-nationals on a principle of non-discrimination. We narrate a creeping process of retrenchment by which European member states have used policy strategies to undermine this principle, by transforming the unique idea of free movement of persons in the EU to just another form of "immigration" which can be subject to selectivity and exclusion. As Europe's multiple recent crises have unfolded, political resources were found to effect this transformation tangibly via reshaping access to welfare for EU citizens. Focusing on the cases of the UK and Germany, we discuss how, despite their distinctive welfare regimes and labour market systems, these two countries have led the way toward a dismantling of non-discrimination for EU citizens and effectively the end of the anomalous 'post-national' dimension of European citizenship.

Crossing borders: the intersectional marginalisation of Bulgarian Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers in Berlin

“…Recent scholarship on LGBTQ migrant access to welfare (Ayoub 2016) demonstrates that neoliberal governments approach the non-heteronormative experiences of migrants with either passive indifference to welfare inequalities or by using ineffective bureaucratic measures that exacerbate exclusion and marginalisation (Barbulescu and Favell 2020). In our research, we contribute to theories of immigration and social policy by generating an intersectional analysis of everyday bordering.…”

European “Freedoms”: A Critical Analysis

“…This leads to access to freedoms and rights for non‐EU migrants being evaluated mostly in terms of costs and benefits, that is to say, of their utility, rather than in terms of universal duties to fellow human beings. I suggest this trend echoes similar worrying developments concerning social policies and social rights for EU migrants that have led to “freedom of movement of persons increasingly being seen as politically problematic, and most likely unsustainable; it has been reduced to just another form of ‘immigration’ like others, that must be subject to the same kinds of sovereign control, restriction and selectivity imposed on conventional forms of international migration from outside the EU” (Barbulescu and Favell 2020, 151).…”

“…This would shed a significant light on its policies towards migrants. Let us take another example, that of the continuous restriction of social rights for EU migrants since the first waves of the 1990s (Barbulescu and Favell 2020) and its connection with anti-non-EU migration policies. The "hostile environment" to non-EU migration in European countries has been applied to EU migrants as well and has led to reshaping welfare entitlements and removing the welfare rights of EU jobseekers.…”

“…Discrimination in the allocation of social rights and benefits to EU migrants is an obvious infringement of the principle of free movement. “Freedom of movement rights [have been] undone on all sides” (Barbulescu 2020, 158). The European Court of Justice, too, has played a role in restricting social rights and freedom of movement only to highly qualified workers, leading to a two‐tier migration system.…”

The Aporia of EU Citizenship

“…However, the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice has turned the situation upside down. The post-Brey case law largely responded to the growing concern among the richer Member States about welfare tourism (Barbulescu and Favell 2020). Particularly, the Court interpreted the Citizenship Directive in a way that establishes 'the link … between the requirement to have sufficient resources as a condition for residence and the concern not to create a burden on the social assistance systems of the Member States' (Dano, para.…”