Citizenship of the Market and the Specter of Perpetual Return

• In Event: Mobilizing and Mobilized Diasporas

Abstract

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of perpetual return. As European citizenship has enabled free movement of people within the European Union’s borders, millions of Central and Eastern Europeans have crossed borders for economic and political reasons without having to become politically uprooted from their countries of origin. This has produced a context in which average citizens work abroad partially or fully disconnecting from the national economy, while remaining politically connected with their homelands. Nationals abroad demand political incorporation and sometimes leverage their transnational lifestyle to amplify their voice (diaspora voting, coordinated protests in several countries, homecomings converging on homeland major cities etc.). Government institutions and political parties have to adapt to citizens’ being no longer physically present on national territory, yet eager to maintain voice at home. This paper examines the interactions of transnationalism from below and transnationalism from above, which I refer to as the politics of mobility. This paper reveals how states and political parties seek to incorporate, shape, or silence intra-EU movers’ political voice at home, by legitimizing their input as a political actor or excluding them from the diaspora. I identify four main government strategies: direct (Romania), defer (Bulgaria), disrupt (Poland), and deny (Hungary). I examine how intra-EU movers have responded to these homeland approaches by combining citizenship rights from national (state) and supranational (European Union/ labor market) sources, unbundling and re-bundling the braid of citizenship through free movement practices that reshape, supplement, and extend migrants' legal resource environments. Citizenship of the Market entails a continuous process of negotiating configurations of economic, social, and political rights through the logics of transnationalism from above and from below.

Author

• Ruxandra Paul, Amherst College