Over mollen en bevers: Mobiliteit binnen de EU, denationalisatie en Europese integratie van onderaf.

For centuries, international mobility used to be relatively uncommon and socially skewed at the extremes of social stratification. Long journeys were the privilege of the rich (think of the Grand Tour) and the curse of the poor (think of the Hollandsgänger). While leisure travel is still not everybody’s pleasure, international mobility has been democratising since. With different motives, ease and duration, human beings increasingly move across countries. Of course, this is not the case all over the globe. But it is a defining feature of a substantial part of the European population in the early twenty-first century. In particular, cross-national mobility shapes the life horizons of young, educated and urban Europeans. The EU free movement regime has made international mobility projects and practices easier in Europe than anywhere else in the world.Moreover, European integration strips the mobility=freedom equation, which is a founding myth of the US (Baudrillard 1998), of its nationalist character. Mobility is a key component of individual freedom all over the West; but in Europe it has been denationalized. Notably, this massive social change has happened in the span of a generation – the last two to three decades. Never since the nation states came into existence, and nowhere else on the planet, have national frontiers lost their primitive role as containers of people’s life horizons. This change also forces us to rethink the very concept of international migration, which is ultimately predicated on the stark separation between national societies