Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Integrating immigrants and minorities 89
opportunities for the Commission because the terms present an ideal combination
of vagueness and normative desirability which can be the source of arguments for
EU task expansiveness in the longer-term (Geddes 2000c).
The academic literature on these new forms of EU level political action has
made connections with what has been called the political sociology of the
international. This concerns analyses of the ways in which Europeanised sources
of power and authority have led to the development of a European political field
with its own forms of culture, capital and habitus. Favell (2001), for instance, takes
the emergence of pro-migrant NGOs at EU level as evidence for the emergence
of a new political field and a nascent ‘sociology of the international [that] aims to
understand the internal relations, conflicts and power brokering of political actors
and organisations within a particular policy arena that is in the process of thereby
constituting itself’. Europeanisation thus has implications for the organisation of
political action and for the link between active citizenship and the nation-state as
its primary locus.
If we take the point about the organisation of political action then we need to
be specific about the forms of political action enabled at EU level. The EU is a
creature of Treaty, but more than this, it is a creature of a Treaty informed by a
strong commercial imperative. At the heart of the European project are marketmaking,
the completion of the European single market, and more recently, the
establishment of the European single currency. We should not expect the EU to
be a progressive exponent of new forms of multiculturalism or identity politics
because it is not that type of organisation. If claims for inclusion by pro-migrant
groups are to be made then they need to draw from the specific legal resources
associated with European integration. In the area of anti-discrimination, the EU
has commitments dating back to the Treaty of Rome (1957) that prohibit
discrimination on grounds of nationality, while also seeking equality between
men and women in the workplace. There were no provisions on other forms of
discrimination such as those based on race, ethnicity or religion. Partly because
these were not salient concerns at the time that the Treaty was drafted back in
the 1950s and partly because these have also been viewed as national responsibilities.
The arguments of pro-migrant groups centred on connecting migrant and
minority rights to the existing legal resources associated with European integration
and thus arguing that extended anti-discrimination provisions were a necessary
accompaniment to single market integration and the kinds of principles that
informed it.
Pro-migrant groups have thus drawn from Europeanised sources of material and
symbolic power that generate ideas about inclusion with a strong economic focus.
Moreover, these ideas were linked to the bounded nature of the European project
in the sense that the EU has both barrier-removing and barrier-building features
that lead to a relatively hard shell being built between itself and neighbouring
states and forms of movement that privilege those empowered to move by the EU
treaties and associated legislation while restricting those forms of movement not
supported by treaty or legislation. In a sense, therefore, the EU faces the boundary
issues raised by the articulation between closed states and open economies. In these