Saturday, April 16, 2016
Concerto B (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
The EU's right of free movement of persons is intended to reflect an ideal of supranational solidarity within the single market. However, in contravention of this ideal, said right has awakened obstacles of popular resistance to the resilience of the integration process as the continued primacy of national identity conceptions in national spheres of discourse comes to clash with the market-making project of the EU. Much attention has been paid to Western European anti-EU sentiment resulting from migration from the Eastern Expansion states. Yet, less has been given empirically to discursive views of the free movement of persons in the CEE states themselves. This paper takes critical discourse analysis of news articles in high circulation press as a conduit through which discourse in the public sphere can be understood in the case of Poland. It seeks to reveal that free movement of persons, when viewed in relation to other obligations of EU membership, proves insufficient to foster feelings of affective identification with 'Europe' in the EU's largest CEE Member. Free movement's use is discussed not as a fundamental European freedom, but as instrumental to national interests in an unfortunate continued necessity of emigration to Western European nation-states. It is part of an aberrant process of integration in which policy is dictated from a foreign capital. This lack of supranational solidarity has pessimistic implications for the resiliency of the EU project: Not only Western, but also Eastern Members, continue to view the EU warily in terms of perceived nationalistic interest.
