Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe

The European Union is founded on the idea of free movement. Eurostars and Eurocities is the first systematic portrait of a generation of European nationals who, by using these rights, have pioneered a new kind of highly skilled and educated migration in Europe. These are the “Eurostars” as the author calls them. In a changing Europe built on economic theories of mobility and integration, they appeared to face none of the discrimination or limitations on work and settlement that still restrict other migrants in Europe. Favell homes in on life for these foreign residents and their families in three classic cosmopolitan “Eurocities”: Amsterdam, London, and Brussels. In their own words, he narrates the promise of a “de-nationalised” Europe which these enthusiastic European citizens are looking for. But there is a human dimension to European integration. Even with all the formal legal barriers down, things are not always so easy. Favell’s 60 in-depth interviews and more than five years of ethnographic and documentary research unearth startling revelations—and contradictions—about life in a United States of Europe supposedly without frontiers. It turns out that less than 2% of European citizens manage to live abroad: Europe is sometimes a road to nowhere. These cosmopolitan cities are also national capitals, which find ways to exclude even the most privileged of foreign residents. Settling down often proves impossible; national identities inescapable. Eurostars and Eurocities is a scholarly book about real people and real places, a rare combination of literary style and sociological analysis. With great sensitivity, it reveals the intimate stories and experiences of some remarkable people, pioneers who left comfortable local career paths and family lives for an uncertain European future