![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The Euro crisis has transformed the European political and economic landscape. Amidst lingering political uncertainties, austerity, high unemployment, and diminished levels of trust in the European project, how has the Euro crisis affected the institution of citizenship within the European Union? While the development of EU citizenship and the number of rights and freedoms attached to it since the 1990s has progressively reduced the incentive of intra-EU migrants to acquire citizenship in other member states, I argue that the Euro crisis and its political and economic consequences have reinvigorated the perceived value of national citizenship. In its wake, many intra-EU migrants, and especially those from the most crisis-stricken countries, may have a renewed incentive naturalise in other member states. Using data collected for 14 Western European countries from 2000 to 2013, I demonstrate how a growing lack of trust in political institutions and economic hardship since the Euro crisis has inspired surprising new naturalisation trends across Europe. Rather than perpetuate a further decline of national citizenship in Europe, the Euro crisis appears to have rendered national citizenship once again politically consequential.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Special Eurobarometer 75.1 – The European Ombudsman and Citizens’ Rights – July 2011.
2. See for example European Commission (Citation2011) Employment and social developments in Europe 2011, “Chapter 6: Intra-EU labour mobility and the impact of enlargement”, 256.
3. Third Report from the Commission on Citizenship of the Union, COM (2001) 506 final (9 July 2001).
4. EU Citizenship Report 2013 from the Commission, COM(Citation2013b) 269 final (8 May 2013).
5. George Soros, “How to Save the EU from the Euro Crisis,” The Guardian, April 9, 2013. Examples of less exaggerated speculations include The Economist, “Is Grexit good for the euro?” June 16, 2012, and Ralph Atkins, “Trichet warns on dangers of Greek eurozone exit,” Financial Times, February 24, 2015.
6. This is not to claim that manifest distrust of the EU as a phenomenon is only associated with the Euro crisis in any one country. Indeed, persistent and deep-seated Euroskepticism has long existed to varying degrees across many countries, and uncertainty and distrust may certainly be caused by longer term factors that may precede or extend beyond the crisis. While existing data do not permit one to fully disentangle these deeper forms of distrust from crisis-induced distrust, distrust of the EU nonetheless seems to be a proximate and short-term phenomenon and one direct and observable consequence of the Euro crisis. Thus its use as a proxy variable for the crisis and its effects on naturalization seem conceptually appropriate.
7. Although few political scientists have examined the economics of naturalization, a number of economists have explored this citizenship premium in both the North American and European context. However, the evidence is so far mixed. Bratsberg, Ragan, and Nasir (Citation2002) find that the wage premium associated with naturalization is greater for immigrants from poorer countries, while DeVoretz and Pivnenko (Citation2004) find in the Canadian case that acquiring citizenship increased the naturalized immigrant’s earnings. Fougère and Safi (Citation2009) analyze longitudinal data and uncover a large citizenship premium earned with naturalization in France, particularly for economically disadvantaged immigrants. In another study of immigrants in the Netherlands, Bevelander and Veenman (Citation2008) conclude that naturalized immigrants earn more generally than non-naturalized immigrants in the Netherlands, but other demographic and labor market variables tend to wash out its statistical effect.
8. Of course, the crisis has unleashed and exacerbated many political sentiments in addition to uncertainty and political distrust, and uncertainty and distrust may also be caused by factors other than the crisis. However, from the evidence presented above, measuring political distrust as one sentiment to capture the political consequences of the Euro crisis in home and destination member states seems conceptually justifiable and highly relevant to the years under analysis.
9. The countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal Spain, Sweden, and the UK. While Norway is admittedly not a member of the European Union, it is a member of the Schengen area and EU and Norwegian nationals may travel passport-free across their shared border. For this reason its inclusion in this analysis is not theoretically problematic.
10. In addition to using robust standard errors, I re-run the same analyses on the smaller, non-imputed dataset using panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) advocated by Beck and Katz (Citation1995). Although not shown, the conclusions from this alternative specification are broadly similar to the findings using the presented models unless otherwise noted.
11. The choice to rely on the number of acquisitions per country-year rather than naturalization rates per country-year (total number of citizenship acquisition/intra-EU migrant population) may seem questionable, in that it could bias the analysis due to differences in relative sizes of intra-EU migrant populations. However, there two methodological reasons that using naturalization rates as a dependent variable here is less suitable than the method employed here. First, many of the variables used to predict naturalization – unemployment, trust, political conditions, policy, annual inflows, migration rates, and so forth – affect not only the numerator of the dependent variable (number of naturalizations in a given country-year), but also the denominator (size of the respective population in that year) as well. This means that both the numerator and denominator are correlated to differing degrees with different predictors, rendering the statistical relationship unpredictable and difficult to estimate. Second, with OLS regression, the model would predict values that are beyond the acceptable range of values, that is, below 0 or above 1. As a consequence of these truncations, the predicted relationship also becomes non-linear. Both problems would require less straightforward model specification than OLS, such as a tobit regression, with little gain methodologically. Rather than including population size as a control in the denominator of the dependent variable, I therefore include it as an independent control variable, which should address concerns about bias.
12. The survey question reads, ‘I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in certain institutions. For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it or tend not to trust it: The European Union?’ Because Eurobarometer did not conduct its surveys in Norway, the distrust scores were included as either imputed values or as averages of the other Scandinavian countries in the sample. Neither specification changed the results. A-12 trust levels were drawn from the separate Candidate Countries Eurobarometer surveys from 2001 to 2003 and from Standard Eurobarometer surveys for the remaining years.
13. For example, the weighted GIIPS distrust value for Germany in a given year is the average of the distrust levels in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain weighted by the relative size of each population of nationals living in Germany in that year. In this way, we capture a respective distrust level perceived by that population of GIIPS nationals in their region of origin. This makes no assumption that naturalizing GIIPS migrants share this same degree of distrust as co-nationals at home, but rather that the reported levels of distrust at home are at least perceptible to these migrant abroad and sufficient enough to inspire some of them to acquire citizenship acquisition abroad. For country-years for which data was unavailable, the relative weights were interpolated based on relative population figures and projections in available adjacent years. Although interpolation results in more imprecise country-year weights, there is no reason to expect that the loss of precision in a given country-year introduces bias into the relative weighting of the variables.
14. While a number of citizenship policy indices currently exist in the literature, none to my knowledge are coded on an annual basis for the period of investigation, which limits the ability to control for variation over the period of analysis. For details about the index and coding rules, see the author’s website.
15. Immigrant inflows are highly correlated with and are often predicted by other explanatory variables in the models, especially immigrant population size, which introduces multicollinearity into the many of the models. This variable is therefore omitted in models where this is the case.
16. As a robustness check, I ran the same models (Model 3) with aggregate weighted trust variables instead of distrust and the results are very similar. In addition, to address concerns that measuring distrust in the EU may be a conceptually problematic indicator of the crisis and to disentangle it from preexisting distrust sentiments, I ran these models with a variable measuring the difference between the annual distrust level and the baseline level in 2000. This also had little significant effect on the conclusions drawn from these results.
17. This variable was drawn from the same Eurobarometer surveys and coded equivalently. The survey question reads, ‘I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in certain institutions. For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it or tend not to trust it? The [Nationality] Parliament?’
18. Personal recorded interview #1001 with anonymous naturalization officer, Staatsangehörigkeitsbehörde Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (Berlin, July 5, 2014).
19. Anonymous semi-structured interviews with naturalizing immigrants were conducted in the summer of 2013 and 2014.
20. As one reviewer very helpfully noted, the mechanism underlying intra-EU naturalization patterns might actually be one based on intra-EU migrants seeking not to gain particular rights but to avoid particular obligations. Specifically, intra-EU migrants may be responding to increased tax obligations in their countries of origin, and naturalization in other EU countries provides a means to avoid such financial obligations. In Greece, for example, governments of various political orientations beginning in 2010 have passed tax increases in attempts to boost government revenues and to qualify for additional bailout funds from EU and International Monetary Fund lenders. Although my empirical analysis is agnostic on the question of rights versus obligations and does not test for this possibility directly, these increases in tax rates themselves can be explained by the economic crisis in countries of origin, and hence my theoretical explanation about the crisis’ impact on naturalization only becomes stronger.