From Free Movement to Migration Crisis: Events and Ideas in Europe

The principle of free movement has existed in some form since the founding of the European Economic Community in 1957. This principle was originally meant to facilitate the movement of industrial workers, but over time it expanded to include additional categories of people including students, trainees, family members, and retirees. With the establishment of European citizenship in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, all EU citizens now have the right to work and reside throughout the territory of the European Union, subject to certain conditions. In spite of the fact that free movement has to some degree become a part of the everyday life of Europeans, the implementation of this principle has not been without controversy. In fact, free movement sometimes contributes to the sense there is a “migration crisis” in Europe. When, and for whom, is free movement perceived as a crisis, and why? This dissertation develops a theory of migration crisis, arguing migration crisis is a narrative mechanism used by political actors to define certain migration flows as a challenge to the nation-state. This is part of a dynamic process through which governing elites and civil society groups compete over dominant migration policy narratives and narratives of national identity. In the process, debates over free movement morph from narrowly-defined migration policy debates to debates over fundamental ideas such as national identity, sovereignty, and the legitimacy of the European Union. Surprisingly, given the number of references to a migration crisis in contemporary European public discourse, a theorization of migration crisis is largely absent from Comparative Politics scholarship. Examining the cases of the free movement of EU migrants in the UK, Roma in France, and more broadly, asylum seekers in the EU, the argument moves beyond comparative statics and ideal-types at the national level, as well as paradigmatic ideas that drive consensus at the regional level. Based on qualitative document analysis and 26 interviews with migration policy stakeholders in the European Union conducted from 2012 to 2014, this dissertation traces the dynamic and contingent process by which ideas are invoked through mutually constitutive narratives of migration crisis and national identity.