94 F. De Witte and freedom of movement allows them to understand themselves (and the possible realisations of that self) in much more authentic terms. This freedom of movement allows an LGBT+ couple that lives in a country in which the legal, political, cultural or social conditions do not allow for meaningful recognition of their love to move to a more permissive environment. It allows a retired teacher from Middlesbrough to enjoy her pension in sunny Lanzarote, and it allows a Romanian IT-consultant to move to Lille to live with his Hungarian girlfriend who works as a nurse in Belgium. Freedom of movement allows Europe’s citizens to move for love, work, family, language, social or cultural reasons, or simply to be somewhere ‘else’. It is about liberating the individual from the possibilities, opportunities, prejudices, cultural and social norms or convention (or even weather) that exists in their ‘own’ country, and about making available realisations of life in other states that might much more closely fit with the individual’s own preferences. To turn this around, it also means limiting the capacity of states to force the individual to live her life in a particular fashion. This emancipatory potential of free movement is not only realized through actual movement. It also has a reflexive virtue: it orients the individual’s visions of self-realisation and self-understanding outwards. The possibility of free movement allows for many different realisations and understandings of the self that may have been unavailable but for free movement. Freedom of movement, in other words, liberates not only the body but also the mind from the normative structures of the state. Free movement, as such, is to be defended normatively as it problematizes the domination that the nation state exerts over our choices, self-­ understanding and images of self-realisation. To put it as bluntly as possible, the nation state’s mode of social integration reduces the incredibly complex individual to a one-dimensional being: a national. We all have many meaningful relationships and ties of identification with different groups in society, based on our profession, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, residence, language group, hobbies, or sharing of certain social or cultural preferences (a football team, a mode of transport, a type of music, cuisine or mode of living). The nation state, however, essentially tells us that while those relationships and patterns of identification may matter to us privately, the only one that matters for us as public individuals is that of nationality. It is with nationals, after all, that we have to share our resources and that we have to discuss what is allowed or not in society. And it is the nation-state that can coerce us into (not) taking particular actions, that can criminalise certain behaviours, that can trivialise certain needs or that can prevent certain aspirations. As Amartya Sen explains, this ‘increasing tendency towards seeing