A European labour market and nationally bounded welfare states. EU emigration and challenges to social citizenship

ABSTRACT

Access to the EU’s labour market and the principle of freedom of movement for persons (FMP) produced a mismatch for some countries of origin of migrants: Emigration of s cale decreased the resource base for the welfare state nationally while not sharing responsibility for social citizenship with the EU level. The countries of Lithuania and Romania are insightful for studying the political consequences of this mismatch. Surprisingly, collective actors from politics, social partners, and civil society hardly identified EU responsibility for emigration and its externalities. In contrast, solutions for the mismatch are sought at the domestic level. There, actors find themselves in a conundrum: Options for restricting FMP are politically unfeasible, measures for retaining the population hard to finance, and a cut back of some benefits unavoidable. Ultimately, this mismatch may lead to a vicious cycle in which emigration and the decreasing quality of social citizenship reinforce each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• EU freedom of movement
• emigration
• social citizenship
• welfare state

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Michael Blauberger, Cecilia Bruzelius, Anna Kyriazi, Susanne K. Schmidt for their very valuable comments on drafts of the manuscript at workshops at Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg in 2022 and a mini-symposium at CES in Iceland in 2023. A very welcoming and productive research stay at the Migration Policy Centre at EUI in the spring of 2023 greatly contributed to the conceptual work on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant (458587043) from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.