migration and mobility in the european union
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This article was downloaded by: [Columbia University]On: 13 November 2014, At: 21:27Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Ethnic and Migration StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20
Migration and Mobility in the EuropeanUnionRegine Paul aa University of BathPublished online: 22 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Regine Paul (2013) Migration and Mobility in the European Union, Journal ofEthnic and Migration Studies, 39:6, 1037-1038, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2013.772789
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.772789
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Reviews
Christina Boswell and Andrew Geddes, Migration
and Mobility in the European UnionBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 272 pp.,
£25.99 pb. (ISBN 978-0-230-00748-2)
Migration and Mobility in the European Union
explores the dynamics of policies governing the
rights and statuses of migrants in Europe. This is
no easy job: policy complexities stem from 1) the
multilevel nature of the policy process between the
EU, member-states, regions and even municipa-
lities, 2) the highly diverse types of migration
involved and 3) high levels of contestation over the
aims and drivers of specific migration policies.
Boswell and Geddes promise nothing less than to
offer a ‘novel analytical framework’ which ‘cuts
through this complexity without being simplistic’.
This review assesses the success of this ambitious
endeavour across three aspects: robustness of the
authors’ analytical framework, its empirical in-
sights, and its sensitivity to critically exploring
policy implications.The analytical framework is developed in two
consecutive chapters. Chapter 2 sets out a rich
analytical context by providing plentiful statistical
and background information on different forms of
migration and policies in Europe, including,
usefully, the ‘core dilemmas’ faced in this policy
area. The authors then go on to engage critically
with the notions of policy failure and securitisa-
tion which dominate many migration policy
analyses. Both, they argue, tend to underestimate
the way in which the ‘often piecemeal, reactive,
inconsistent, and ambiguous nature of policy’
might serve particular purposes and ‘failure’ might
well be a rational outcome. Boswell and Geddes’
alternative approach acknowledges the complexity
of the policy process and aims to disentangle it
empirically. This enables them to show, for
example, that a ‘malintegration’ of tough policy
rhetoric on irregular migration and more lenient
implementation practices tolerating informal mi-
grant workers is not necessarily a policy failure,
but might constitute a deliberate strategy of
serving both the interests of a hostile electorate
and employers’ demand for cheap labour. Chapter
3 goes on to establish a role for the EU in
governing migration and mobility, taking stock
of recent changes in multilevel governance. Thus
a finer framework is created for understanding
that political authority is unevenly distributed
across policy narratives and ‘talk’, the political
mobilisation stage, actual decision-making, and
implementation.Chapters 4�9 apply this framework to explore
the specific dynamics for five different types of
migration*labour, family, irregular, asylum, and
EU-internal mobility*as well as policies targeted
at integrating aliens. Boswell and Geddes explore
the policy responses these have engendered and
how they play out across levels and phases of
policy-making. Here, too, the authors’ framework
enables them to expose the underlying rationalities
of policy contradictions rather than writing them
off as a ‘muddle’ or failure. For example, the
co-existence of a liberal regulation of EU-internal
mobility with domestic concerns over welfare
losses and job competition continues to produce
contradictory outcomes for EU free movers. This
example illustrates one of the authors’ key claims:
even in an area where supranational policy-
making dominates, we cannot write ‘member
states off the equation’.The broader picture painted in this book,
however, inevitably neglects the highly differential
relationships between the EU and different
member-states, regions, and even municipalities.
Other research has shown that the dynamics of
mobility and migration policy in a multilevel
setting vary considerably not just according to
migration type*the authors’ key independent
variable*but also to receiving and sending coun-
try, their specific historical (for example colonial)
relationships, the locality in which a foreign
resident is to be integrated, and the economic
sector in which s/he is employed.The authors further diagnose a ‘steady devel-
opment of EU mobility and migration structures’
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013
Vol. 39, No. 6, 1037�1039, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.772789
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as a general tendency, explicable mainly through
the development of the Common Market and theperceived need to ‘compensate’ for internal secur-
ity measures by ‘rebundling authority at EU level’.
But are these explanations really common to allmember-states? The authors rightly indicate that
policies in Southern and Eastern Europe havebeen shaped much more strongly by the EU
framework than have those in older member-states. Regrettably, they do not pursue this thread
towards a more critical analysis of the geopolitics
and political economy of EU integration.Also missing from the discussion is an ac-
knowledgement of the far-reaching, and uneven,implications for migrants themselves of the multi-
tiered distribution of policy-making in Europe.
Why does it matter that EU policies apparentlyneatly distinguish between types of migrants? Why
should we care whether the EU and member-stateshave more or less to say in the policy process?
Contextualising the authors’ astute findings withinreflections on the state of migrants’ rights, social
justice and democracy in Europe could have
demonstrated much more effectively why, indeed,we should care and continue to analyse policy
developments vigilantly.These modest criticisms aside, Migration and
mobility in the European Union will strongly
influence scholars of migration and Europeanintegration alike. Its timely assemblage of extre-
mely rich empirical material in a robust andappropriately nuanced analytical framework will
enable readers, including post-graduate students,to start making sense of a highly complex terrain
of policy-making.
Regine Paul
University of BathEmail: [email protected]
# 2013, Regine Paul
Aleksandra Maatsch, Ethnic Citizenship Regimes:
Europeanization, Post-War Migration andRedressing Past Wrongs. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011, 224 pp., £58.00 hb. (ISBN 978-
0-230-28424-1)
After many decades in which national citizenshipwas conceived as an exclusive feature of states and
nations, limited by territorial boundaries, therecent increase of migration flows as well as EU
transnational developments are shifting the focus.
Along the road, two main challenges have becomevisible: the emergence of a European citizenship
and the sensitivity of national citizenship regula-
tions to migration. Aleksandra Maatsch compre-
hensively approaches the latter topic in her book
Ethnic Citizenship Regimes: Europeanization, Post-
War Migration and Redressing Past Wrongs. Her
analysis seeks to understand how and why the
legislation of both receiving (Germany) and send-
ing (Hungary and Poland) states changed over two
decades (1985�2007). The book accurately maps
the legislative changes in each country and pro-
vides empirical evidence revealing that divergent
national citizenship legislation is shaped not by
concepts of nationhood but by the desire of the
states to redress past wrongs, their postwar
migration experience, and horizontal (rather than
vertical) Europeanisation.Unlike most citizenship studies using the
exclusive lenses of legal provisions, Maatsch’s
analytical endeavour is complex in its attempt to
explain the paths followed by legislation on
national citizenship. Building extensively on
institutionalist theories, this book combines docu-
ment analysis with qualitative and quantitative
analysis of the discourse of parliamentary debates
in each country. One merit of the study is the
emphasis placed on the legislation-making pro-
cess; the author acknowledges and analyses legis-
lators’ discursive rhetoric, which is ignored by
most studies on citizenship but likely to shape
final legal provisions. Consequently, the explana-
tions here are deeper, and more persuasively and
thoroughly argued. Such analysis is particularly
relevant when the book addresses themes related
to citizenship*migration, historical legacies and
Europeanisation*in countries characterised by
geographical (East vs West), political and cultural
differences. The book makes a relevant contribu-
tion to the current debate regarding the liberal
convergence of national citizenship legislation
within the EU. The citizenship legislation of
post-Communist countries complies with Western
European standards, but this trend is not triggered
by liberal convergence. Instead, a mixture of
domestic and exogenous factors (i.e. horizontal
norm diffusion) best explains legislative change.Two details overlooked by the author raise
methodological questions and have further em-
pirical consequences. Firstly, the author’s
structured and straightforward analysis of parlia-
mentary debates in Germany, Hungary and Poland
could have greatly benefited from a more com-
prehensive theoretical account of the legislatures
as institutions. While the legislative and represen-
tative functions of parliaments are explicitly
emphasised, their transformative roles are
neglected. Accordingly, only one side of the coin
is presented: that parliaments are arenas offering
1038 Reviews
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