Saturday, April 16, 2016
Aria A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
When and why does freedom of movement become politically salient? This paper examines the case study of the United Kingdom in order to explain how the U.K.’s policy responses to the “problem” of E.U. migration shifted from the restriction of domestic welfare benefits to the proposed fundamental reform of free movement at the E.U. level. This paper traces the process by which the policy narrative of “benefits tourism” was linked to the “crisis” of the expiration of controls on freedom of movement to migrants from Bulgaria and Romania. The construction of the crisis emerged from an inter- and intra-party domestic political process by which Euroskeptics highlighted the perceived potential damage to British society by Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. Further, this crisis represented a political opportunity for David Cameron to reassert a new definition of British national identity. By linking benefits tourism and E.U. migration with different elements of the ideational repertoire of British nationhood, including British exceptionalism vis-à-vis the E.U. and values such as community relations, work, “aspiration,” in contrast to “sclerotic” European countries, Cameron capitalized on the opportunity to shift the policy debate upward from a question of domestic benefits reform to British membership in the E.U. Overall this paper brings to light some of the long-term unresolved tensions between national identity and collectively shared principles like freedom of movement, which are now becoming matters not only of highly salient domestic policy conflict, but of more fundamental questions regarding the responsibilities of member states to one another.
