Adrian Favell

The new face of East-West migration in Europe

In order to contextualise the papers in this special issue, this paper presents an overview and framework for understanding the importance of East–West migration in Europe associated with the EU enlargement process. The new patterns and forms of migration seen among East European migrants in the West—in terms of circular and temporary free movement, informal labour market incorporation, cultures of migration, transnational networks, and other phenomena documented in the following papers—illustrate the emergence of a new migration system in Europe. Textbook narratives, in terms of standard accounts of immigration, integration and citizenship based on models of post-colonial, guestworker and asylum migration, will need to be rethought. One particularly fertile source for this is the large body of theory and research developed in the study of Mexican–US migration, itself a part of a regional integration process of comparative relevance to the new European context. While the benefits of open migration from the East will likely triumph over populist political hostility, it is a system that may encourage an exploitative dual labour market for Eastern movers working in the West, as well as encouraging a more effective racial or ethnically-based closure to immigrants from South of the Mediterranean and further afield.

Markets against politics: Migration, EU enlargement and the idea of Europe

This article examines new migration to Europe in the context of EU enlargement and debates about fortress Europe, framing the general agenda for the papers that follow in this special issue. We argue that the (normatively informed) image of fortress Europe is an inadequate account of migration and migration policy in Europe in three respects: the movement of family members, asylum-seekers and labour migrants has been substantially positive; enlargement itself generates dynamics of inclusion as much as exclusion; and there exists a significant component of intra-European circulatory migration. Against the fortress account, the article offers a market-driven analysis of new migration to Europe. In developing this account, we stress how existing theoretical accounts of immigration policy - dominated by a state-centred institutionalist and political focus - offer at best only partial explanations of the new European migration scenario. Both neo-liberal and older Marxian theories of the international immigration labour market need to be re-introduced to explain the selective, expansive and reconfiguring effect of market forces on European immigration policies. Our aim is to underline how new tendencies in East-West migration in Europe challenge and transform the traditional migrant trajectory from migrant to citizen that lies at the heart of state-centred accounts.

The Sociology of the European Union An Agenda

We seek to shape an agenda for the growing interest in using sociological approaches to study the European Union (EU). In order to deepen and broaden the Europeanization agenda, the article points to how sociology can help reveal the ‘social bases’ of European integration (i.e. processes of European Union), as well as identify effects on European society that might reconnect EU studies with key comparative political economy debates about the European ‘varieties of capitalism’ and its models of economy and society. Unfortunately, however, ‘sociological’ approaches towards the EU have mostly been wrongly equated with the ‘constructivist turn’ in EU studies, and its characteristic preference for ‘soft’ qualitative discursive methods and meta-theory. We argue that, rather than turning to culture, identity or social theory for inspiration, an empirical sociological approach to the EU would reintroduce social structural questions of class, inequality, networks and mobility, as well as link up with existing approaches to public opinion, mobilization and claims-making in the political sociology of the EU. To conclude, the article identifies some exemplary studies along these lines.

Sociology of the European Union

Introduction A.Favell & V.Guiraudon PART I: SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS Social Class and Identity J.D.Medrano Social Mobility and Spatial Mobility A.Favell & E.Recchi Elites, Middle Classes and Cities A.Andreotti & P.Le Gales Markets and Firms N.Fligstein PART II: POLITICS AND POLICIES Mobilizations V.Guiraudon EU Politics N.Kauppi EU Policies F.Merand Social Theory and European Integration H.Trenz Postface G.Ross

Games without Frontiers? Questioning the Transnational Social Power of Migrants in Europe

This paper asks whether it is possible to study “elite” professional migrants in Europe with the same concepts and theories being used to explain the incorporation and/or integration of “ethnic” (i.e., non European) migrants in Europe; that is, in terms of their social mobility and social power in their new host countries. While globalisation may in theory make it easier for these professional migrants to transfer their “social capital” to other national contexts, observations of the personal and professional trajectories of European professional migrants in Brussels—particularly their difficulties establishing a true social power in a foreign national—suggests that theorists often overstate their arguments about “global cities” and the decline of the nation-state, at least as far as Europe is concerned. The paper links these empirical concerns with theoretical issues arising from the work of Bourdieu, Mann, Coleman, Castells and Portes, aiming to build a bridge between current work in ethnic and migration studies and core current issues in social theory.

Migration, mobility and globaloney: metaphors and rhetoric in the sociology of globalization

Books reviewed in this article: John Urry, Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century, New York and London: Routledge Nikos Papastergiadis, The turbulence of migration: globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and migration: globalization and the politics of belonging

James Coleman: Social Theorist and Moral Philosopher?

The reception of James Colemans monumental recent work Foundations of Social Theory has to date been narrowly technical in scope. This article seeks to redress this by offering a broader, philosophical reading of Colemans work, one that brings out the full breadth of his intentions. It considers his account of the failigs of comtemporary political and moral philosophy and his own theory of rights, the self, and corporate structures in society. It goes on to discuss the limits of a comprehensive rational choice theory and the viability of Colemans aspiration to found a positive social theory that can be at the heart of reflections on institutional reform and policy-making.

The fourth freedom: Theories of migration and mobilities in 'neo-liberal' Europe

The article challenges the orthodoxy of current critical readings of the European crisis that discuss the failings of the EU in terms of the triumph of ‘neo-liberalism’. Defending instead a liberal view on international migration, which stresses the potentially positive economic, political and cultural benefits of market-driven forces enabling movements across borders, it details the various ways in which European regional integration has enabled the withdrawal of state control and restriction on certain forms of external and internal migration. This implementation of liberal ideas on the freedom of movement of persons has largely been of benefit to migrants, and both receiving and sending societies alike. These ideas are now threatened by democratic retrenchment. It is Britain, often held up as a negative example of ‘neo-liberalism’, which has proven to be the member state that most fulfils the EU’s core adherence to principles of mobile, open, non-discriminatory labour markets. On this question, and despite its current anti-immigration politics, it offers a positive example of how Europe as a whole could benefit from more not less liberalization.

Pioneers of European Integration: An Introduction

The European Union stands as a unique economic, political, legal and social experiment in transnational regional integration. The world we live in may still be one primarily organized by and for territorial nation states, but if one empirical example is to be sought of how a post-national or cosmopolitan polity and society might be built, the EU is the only actually existing institutional example. Built on a regional territorial logic, its complex structures are also the best guide to the way a progressive and governable political order might be constructed from the economic free-for-all of globalisation. In no other part of the world have sovereign nation states bonded together to voluntarily relinquish large aspects of their sovereign control of economy and polity to a set of common supranational institutions. And in no other part of the world have such institutions created a form of post-national citizenship within a transnational regional political order. Arguably the most fundamental part of the traditional nation state’s claim to sovereignty is its claim of territorial jurisdiction over the member citizens that live within its borders (Torpey 2000). Yet at the heart of the European Union lies the principle of free movement: of the capital, goods and services that oil the wheels of international trade and business, but also of persons who, within its realm, now have the right to move, travel, study-work, settle and retire anywhere within its member states. EU citizens can move and demand equal treatment to that of all nationals of the same territory in every dimension of work and public life. This revolutionary principle has existed within European law since the Treaty of Rome in 1957; with the expansion of the EU to 25 members in 2004 and 2007, it now extends the notion of European citizenship – and potentially of a single European society – all the way from the Atlantic to the Urals and the borders of the Black Sea (European Commission 2002).

Citizenship and immigration: Pathologies of a progressive philosophy

Abstract Across Western Europe and North America, ideas about citizenship have become central to understanding the problems involved in immigration and the integration of ethnic minorities and likewise to formulating their resolution in public policy. Academics for their part have reflected this growing political interest by rediscovering citizenship as a theoretical concept, going well beyond its formal legal meaning into discussions about its symbolic, affective and moral dimensions: citizenship as membership or belonging; citizenship as participation or duty. The present article attempts to bridge the gap between the two arenas of policy and theory and to show how abstract, normative discussions of citizenship can bear a relation to immigration questions in practice. The scene is set with a theoretical discussion of the role of normative ideas and values in explaining the policy process and the emergence of institutions for dealing with specific public problems. This theoretical model is then applied t...