Dilemmas for the left on EU citizenship

Owen Parker - Lecturer in Politics, University of Sheffield 

On the other hand, a progressive’s sympathy for the plight of the family concerned might be outweighed by a concern that the non-discrimination principle enshrined in EU law will have the consequence of eroding national welfare settlements in general.   As De Witte has argued, ‘where bonds of reciprocity are stretched to include citizens who are perceived not to “deserve” access, and the communal willingness to fund social structures decreases, it is, crucially, not only the migrant Union citizen that loses out on social benefits but also the immobile citizen who has remained within his own state’.  The danger from this perspective is that a strict application of non-discrimination leads to a Europe that, as Menendez has evocatively put it, is ‘more human but less social’.

At the heart of this dilemma is the fact that many on the left are, as Favell has suggested, ‘emotionally cosmopolitan but viscerally nationalist in their conception of how markets are to be controlled or governed’.  In the case of EU citizens and free movement, this has recently led to a somewhat reluctant social democratic argument (of the sort put forth by Goodhart) in favour of the imposition of some sort of discrimination on the basis of nationality in an attempt to rescue the welfare state.

But is the principle of non-discrimination necessarily a threat to principles of welfare and a so-called social Europe?  I argue that it isn’t.

First, we need to see that the question of ‘deservingness’ is not fixed, but very much open to political manipulation.  In the UK politicians of various stripes have been predisposed to promote the perception that certain EU citizen claimants (along with a variety of other categories, it should be said) are undeserving and have used this as the pretext for general welfare cuts.  A progressive politics ought to highlight the gaps between rhetoric and reality, point to the fact that ‘welfare tourism’ is not easily defined or quantified and draw attention to evidence of the overall economic benefits of free movement.

Second, and more fundamentally, progressives should highlight that the more important threats to social settlements emanate from elsewhere.  Since at least the 1980s, the EU/ECJ has chipped away at member-states’ autonomy in a range of areas – such as tax regulation, corporate law and labour law – which have had significant knock-on effects for the social settlements of those states and contributed to increasing inequality.  Of late, the current austerity agenda has served only to exacerbate further this EU-led hollowing out of national welfare.  These issues, not non-discrimination of EU citizens, should be the main focus for the left.

The upshot of this argument is that a European social model that is to some extent ‘both human and social’ – surely the aim of a truly progressive politics – would require both a short-term defence of non-discrimination and a long-term promotion of an EU citizenship that amounts to more than a negative right to non-discrimination in EU space.

This is in effect to assert a stronger (not weaker) EU citizenship, underpinned by a greater degree of re-regulation (of, inter alia, finance, tax, corporations and labour law), fiscal centralisation and greater re-distribution at the EU level.  This would leave room for national and sub-national autonomy, but at the same time go far enough to establish the preconditions for a genuine European social contract and associated citizenship.

Perhaps such an aspiration is idealistic, given the overwhelming cultural and structural barriers involved.  The problem is that any alternative to this more substantive vision of EU citizenship leaves progressives stuck with the difficult choice identified here between the ‘human’ and the ‘social’.