InternalFortress · Internal Fortress: Regulating European Freedom of Movement within the Nation-State, 1950-1980

Against the prevailing view that freedom of movement lowered internal barriers to movement while raising walls against outsiders to create a ‘fortress Europe,’ this project investigates how the introduction of freedom of movement may have strengthened national political authority over European migration within the member states of the European Economic Community (EEC). InternalFortress suggests that as governments gradually lifted entry restrictions across the EEC, they also built out new internal administrative machinery to insert ‘Community migrants’ into key areas of social and economic life, placing migrants from outside the bloc at a disadvantage within local communities. The project explores this hypothesis in three key areas: social security, skill development, and union participation. The PI will lead a team of two PhD researchers and one postdoc to deploy a methodologically innovative multi-layered research program that analyses the interplay between national, European, and international institutions, as well as the private NGO networks that flowed between those formal frameworks. In contrast to previous histories of freedom of movement, which explain policy outcomes leading up to today’s regime of European citizenship, InternalFortress makes an important interpretive innovation by focusing squarely on the early process of transition from the 1950s to the 1970s. The project will investigate how the improvised nature of early integration created gaps and tensions that were consolidated in the 1970s as national and regional migration policies settled into more rigid patterns. InternalFortress suggests that policies behind the border matter as much as policies at the border for understanding the acrimonious debates around European migration that continue through the present.