Reading Too Much and Too Little into
the Matter? Latent Limits and Potentials
of EU Freedom of Movement
Julija Sardelić
This EUDO-Citizenship debate has shown that EU freedom of movement is
under attack. As Rainer Bauböck highlighted in his contribution, the outcome of the EU membership referendum in the UK casts a ‘long and dark
shadow’ over any debate on EU freedom of movement. However, EU freedom of movement still has as many defenders as attackers on the legal,
political and academic fronts, as well as in practical everyday contexts. As
did Vesco Paskalev, I want to start this contribution with my own personal
experience: I am a Slovenian citizen, who studied and worked in EU Member
States other than my own, such as Hungary, Italy and the United Kingdom,
where I currently reside. I have personally benefited from the rights granted
to me under the EU Freedom of Movement Directive (2004/38/EC). This
made it a lot easier to be mobile across the EU than it has been for my nonEU colleagues. And with the Brexit vote, I contemplate what my own position will be as a non-UK EU national living and working in the UK in the
long run.
In this contribution I aim to show that both attackers and defenders of
free movement share some presumptions in their arguments. In the debate
on free movement both often read too much into the potential of freedom of
movement and underestimate its limits. At the same time, they are not sufficiently aware of the potential injustice freedom of movement produces as
a side effect. I will illustrate both of my claims by focusing on the position
of marginalized minorities, who have often been in at the centre of public
anxieties about EU freedom of movement.
Floris de Witte argues that EU freedom of movement is important not
only from a state, but also from an individual perspective because it offers
opportunities for emancipation as well as a ‘recalibration of justice and
democracy’ beyond the state level. Both of his points are well illustrated by
his example of an LGBT couple, who move from one EU Member State to
another in order to get their union recognised and to lead a life with reduced
risk of discrimination. In my view, this example shows how we can read too
© The Author(s) 2019
R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research
Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_28
139
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