The New Cleavage Between Mobile and Immobile Europeans
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divides could be either bridged through consociational power-sharing
between parties representing the different sections or eroded through fostering geographic and social mobility across the divides. The new European
cleavage is different because of divergent political spaces and time horizons.
Mobile citizens regard Europe as their emerging space of opportunity and
increasingly also of identity, whereas the immobile ones look back to the
time when closed nation-states provided comprehensive social protection.
Floris de Witte shares the diagnosis: ‘The main fault line that seems to be
emerging is that between mobile and immobile citizens in the EU’. But he is
not interested in bridging the cleavage. Instead he criticises ‘those scholars
and politicians who wish to understand EU citizenship to be primarily about
the connection between all Member State nationals and the EU rather than
focusing on the rights of mobile citizens alone’. This is the wrong response
to the crisis. As long as European citizenship is nearly exclusively about free
movement, immobile Europeans will not perceive it as a value and as an
important aspect of their identity. I agree with Daniel Thym that what is
needed to win this battle is ‘a vision of social justice for the Union as a
whole, not only for those moving to other Member States’.
For de Witte, ‘[t]he scholarship on “integration through law” suggests
that law is both the agent and object of integration, and is used to push
through the objectives of integration even in the presence of political objection on the national or supranational level’. But today, this seems like the
strategy of generals who always fight the last war. The battle for freedom of
movement and European integration is no longer fought primarily in courts
where individual rights can trump majority preferences; it is increasingly
fought in polling stations, parliaments and the mass media. In order to survive, European integration through law will have to be complemented with
integration through democracy, by winning the hearts and minds not only of
mobile Europeans, but of immobile ones as well.
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