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Mobilities and citizenships

Multiple dimensions of Central Eastern European migration to the United Kingdom

October 2011 — October 2015 Funding: Northumbria University
Description

Unlike classical forms of citizenship, EU citizenship is one in which the tension between mobility and rights dissolves and the two merge to become the fundamental feature of citizenship. This PhD research project explored this fundamental feature by examining the case studies of Romanian and Hungarian post-Accession migration to the United Kingdom. The two case studies allow for a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of the meanings and practices associated with both mobility and citizenship. Hungary and Romania differ greatly in terms of the post-socialist migration potential and patterns of their citizens, and represent two different EU enlargements (2004 and 2007). The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is a recent and not primary destination country for either. These factors offer great opportunities to examine the different structural factors shaping intra-EU east-west mobility, which may become obliterated when looking at migration streams with other characteristics. Hungary and Romania, at the same time, have similarly complex naturalisation laws favouring ethnic kin living outside the state borders, extending EU citizenship to a large population living outside the EU (e.g. Romanians in the Republic of Moldova or Hungarians in the Ukraine) or facing transitional labour market restrictions in most EU countries (e.g. Hungarians in Romania until January 2014). By comparing the mobility experiences of ‘resident citizens’ and ‘external citizens’ we can also expand our understanding of the ways in which people take advantage of the ‘citizenship opportunity structures’ available to them, and achieve a deeper knowledge of how ethnic and national identities relate to European citizenship.

From a critical realist meta-theoretical position the dissertation builds on qualitative data obtained from 56 in-depth interviews with Hungarian and Romanian speakers in London, both ‘ex-resident’ and ‘external’ citizens of the two countries.

Research team
Affiliation

Chris Moreh

Northumbria University

Summary

Unlike classical forms of citizenship, EU citizenship is one in which the tension between mobility and rights dissolves, the two merging to become the fundamental feature of citizenship. This thesis explores this fundamental feature by examining the case of Romanian and Hungarian post-Accession migration to the United Kingdom. It builds theoretically on critiques of ‘transnationalism’ research, the ‘mobilities’ paradigm and ‘citizenship studies’, attempting to overcome their limitations by synthesising their perspectives in order to reach a better understanding of what EU citizenship means for EU citizens, how it is practiced, and how citizenship- and mobility experiences shape individual and national identities. To answer these questions, the thesis builds mainly on qualitative data obtained from semi-structured and narrative interviews, combined with the analysis of secondary statistical data.

The Romanian and Hungarian case studies allow for a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of the meanings and practices associated with both mobility and citizenship. The two countries differ greatly in terms of their post-socialist citizenship opportunity structures and mobility. Both, however, have adopted similar citizenship laws permitting the ‘external’ preferential naturalisation of ethnic kin living outside the state borders, thus extending EU citizenship to a significant population with previously more limited rights. By including in the comparative analysis the mobility experiences of the citizens ‘by birth’ and citizens ‘by naturalisation’ of the two countries, the thesis aims to expand our understanding of the ways in which people take advantage of the opportunities available to them, and further our knowledge of how ethnic and national identities relate to EU citizenship. Based on this empirical comparative framework, the thesis advances the citizenship literature by going beyond the analytical perspectives provided by either single-country studies – where identifying specific conditioning factors is difficult – or large-N comparisons – in which grasping the complexity of factors is not possible.

The thesis examines ‘citizenship’ not only from a receiving-country perspective, as a mode of integration, but mainly as a trans-national process. It argues that EU citizenship should be understood as a ‘mobility citizenship’, and shows how its ‘expansive’ character is shaping the ways in which the main functions and meaning of contemporary ‘citizenship’ are being perceived by citizens. By describing this mechanism it becomes possible to better understand what a trans-national society organised around the core concept of ‘mobility’ may look like, and thus the findings of the thesis are most significant for bridging the gap between the empirical study of mobility, the theoretical propositions post-nationalism and the normative perspectives of comparative citizenship studies.

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