Research & Politics | |
Welfare migration? Free movement of EU citizens and access to social benefits: | |
Michael Blauberger1  | |
关键词: Welfare migration; European Court of Justice; EU citizenship; Europeanization; | |
DOI : 10.1177/2053168014563879 | |
学科分类:社会科学、人文和艺术(综合) | |
来源: Sage Journals | |
【 摘 要 】
This article analyzes the political impact of the European Court of Justiceâs (ECJ) case law concerning the free movement of EU citizens and their cross-border access to social benefits. Public debates about âwelfare migrationâ or âsocial tourismâ often fluctuate between populist hysteria and outright denial, but they obscure the real political and legal issues at stake: that ECJ jurisprudence incrementally broadens EU citizensâ opportunities to claim social benefits abroad while narrowing member statesâ scope to regulate and restrict access to national welfare systems. We argue that legal uncertainty challenges national administrations in terms of workload and rule-of-law standards, while domestic legislative reforms increasingly shift the burden of legal uncertainty to EU migrants by raising evidentiary requirements and threatening economically inactive EU citizens with expulsion. We illustrate this argument first with a brief overview of the EUâs legal framework, highlighting the ambiguity of core concepts from the Courtâs case law, and then with empirical evidence from the UK, Germany and Austria, analyzing similar domestic responses to the ECJâs jurisprudence. We conclude that EU citizenship law, while promising to build the union from below on the basis of equal legal entitlements, may, in fact, risk rousing further nationalism and decrease solidarity across the union.
【 授权许可】
CC BY-NC-ND
【 预 览 】
Files | Size | Format | View |
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RO201902028389701ZK.pdf | 118KB | download |