Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

92 Andrew Geddes
of anti-discrimination legislation into the Treaty. New projects have been established
within the ambit of the Brussels-based Migration Policy Group with which the SLG
was closely associated.
Both the EUMF and SLG organisations made claims about their representativeness
based on the large numbers of affiliated organisations. The Francophone
orientation of the EUMF underpinned a focus on citoyenetté and the extension of EU
citizenship to legally resident third country nationals. The EUMF was established
by the Commission as a representative forum for Europe’s migrant and migrantorigin
populations. There was a terminological problem because many of those
whose concerns were supposed to be addressed by the EUMF were citizens not
migrants. This was because post-colonial migration into the Netherlands, UK and
France, for instance, occurred by people from former colonies who were nationals
of the countries to which they moved. Beyond this, the EUMF also had difficulty
establishing the role intended for it by the Commission. It was difficult to establish
a coherent platform in relation to specifically EU developments from the diverse
interests of a large number of migrant organisations from across the EU. The claims
of the EUMF were also contested by the British-influenced Standing Committee
on Racial Equality in Europe that argued that racism was the key issue that needed
to be addressed.
In terms of its specific advocacy, the EUMF’s proposals to the pre-Amsterdam
intergovernmental conference in 1996 supported legislation to combat racial and
ethnic-based discrimination, but largely centred on a proposal to amend Article
8a of the EU Treaty with the effect that it would read: ‘Citizenship of the Union is
hereby established. Every person holding a nationality of a member state or who
has been lawfully residing in the territory of a member state for five years shall
be a citizen of the Union’. It was then proposed to amend Articles 48–66 covering
free movement so that these rights would also be extended to third country nationals
on the basis of legal residence rather than prior possession of the nationality of a
member state (EUMF 1996).
The EUMF’s strategy also requires some attention. It’s well known that the
Commission relies on the kinds of expert input into the policy development process
that interest groups can provide (Mazey and Richardson 1993). Thus, inputs that
fit with the EU’s prevailing technocratic ethos are particularly highly valued. The
EUMF was viewed as failing to bring forward specific proposals and for serving
as a forum for complaint rather than input into policy development. At the
December 2000 meeting of the EUMF, for instance, a senior Commission official
noted that the Commission funded the EUMF and that as a result it wanted to know
what the EUMF members thought about the two Commission communications
on immigration policy and on asylum issued in November 2000. He argued that as
the Commission was paying for the meeting then it could legitimately expect some
input from the EUMF.
Ultimately, however, the claims about nationality and citizenship made by the
EUMF faced the major problem of not drawing from existing EU resources.
Nationality law was specifically identified by the Maastricht and Amsterdam
Treaties as a matter for the member states with EU citizenship a derivative of prior