European Borders of Justice - Practical Reasoning on Free Movement within the European Union

The right to free movement is considered the right of each European Union (EU) citizen. The present study examines how European politicians justify and criticize freedom of movement in the period from November 2004 to January 2015. The analysis takes into account the discourses of the Heads of State or Government and Ministers of the Interior of six major European states (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Romania). In addition to these national leaders, the speeches of European Commissioners responsible for free movement matters are also considered. The research questions include: 1) How can we theorize about free movement discourses? 2) In what ways do EU politicians articulate and advance their views? 3) How do the observed countries and the European Commission approach the question of European mobility? 4) What do these results reveal about the prevailing moods with respect to Europeanness? The study introduces a new conceptual framework for analysing practical reasoning (justification of actions) in political discourses. The results indicate that the politicians utilize similar types of reasoning across all countries. This means that even though certain politicians may have diametrically opposing views on issues related to free movement, they nonetheless utilize a similar type of reasoning to justify their claims. The study demonstrates that politicians predominantly refer to legal obligations as well as the costs and benefits of free movement and less to sentiment-related issues. In addition to results related to political discourses, the study unearths wider problematics related to free movement and to the groups of “insiders” and “outsiders” in Europe. It brings to light the diversified and variegated approaches towards different groups of movers, which vary from country to country and across the political spectrum. The results reveal that people from outside the EU are categorically depicted as threatening and seem to be therefore less entitled to free movement.Oikeus vapaaseen liikkuvuuteen pidetään jokaisen EU-kansalaisen perusoikeutena. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan sitä, miten vapaa liikkuvuus oikeutetaan ja miten sitä kritisoidaan eurooppalaisten poliitikkojen puheissa marraskuusta 2004 tammikuuhun 2015. Analyysissa tutkitaan kuuden merkittävän EU-maan (Saksa, Iso-Britannia, Ranska, Italia, Espanja ja Romania) valtionpäämiesten ja sisäministerien vapaata liikkuvuutta koskevia lausumia. Valtionjohdon lisäksi tutkimuksessa analysoidaan vapaasta liikkuvuudesta vastaavien EU-komissaarien puheita. Tutkimuksessa vastataan seuraaviin kysymyksiin: 5) Miten vapaan liikkuvuuden diskursseja voidaan teoretisoida? 6) Millä tavalla eurooppalaiset poliitikot ilmaisevat ja perustelevat kantojaan? 7) Millä tavalla tarkastelumaissa ja komissiossa suhtaudutaan eurooppalaiseen liikkuvuuteen? 8) Mitä tulokset paljastavat vallitsevista eurooppalaisuuskäsityksistä? Tutkimuksessa luodaan uusi käsitteellinen viitekehys poliittisten diskurssien analysointiin. Tulokset osoittavat, että poliitikot voivat olla asiasta täysin vastakkaista mieltä, mutta he hyödyntävät silti samanlaisia perusteita väitteidensä oikeuttamiseksi. Useimmin lausumissa vedotaan EU-sopimuksiin sekä liikkuvuuden aikaansaamiin (taloudellisiin) hyötyihin ja kustannuksiin. Sen sijaan vähemmän huomiota kiinnitetään yhteisöllisyyteen ja solidaarisuuteen. Poliittisia diskursseja koskevien tulosten lisäksi tutkimus avaa vapaan liikkuvuuden problematiikkaa, sen sisäpiiriläisiä ja ulkopuolelle jääviä. Eri liikkujaryhmiin suhtaudutaan eri tavalla eri maissa ja politiikan eri laidoilla. Tutkimuksessa osoitetaan, että EU:n ulkopuolelta tulevat kuvataan säännönmukaisesti uhkaavampina ja vähemmän oikeutettuina vapaaseen liikkuvuuteen.Väitöskirjan verkkoversiossa on julkaistu vain teoksen johdanto ja johtopäätökset Notice. The electronic version of the thesis differs from the printed version. The electronic version contains only the introduction and discussion parts of the dissertation

Discourses on differentiated integration in Finland – Controversy over the Prüm Convention, credit-claiming for Pesco

This article discusses discourses on differentiated integration (DI) in Finland both from the quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It illustrates how salient DI has been in Finland between 2004 and 2019 and how government and opposition parties have approached DI, with special focus on the Prüm Convention and Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) in defence. It also examines approaches towards polity differentiation, i.e., the idea of multi-speed or multi-end Europe, as well as discourses on DI mechanisms, namely enhanced cooperation and opt-outs. The article concludes that the Finnish approach towards DI is pragmatic and generally positive, as the country has joined almost all instances of enhanced cooperation, unlike its Nordic neighbours Denmark and Sweden. This may be due to the lack of politicisation of DI in Finland, which has also allowed the country to join those instances

Schain, Martin A. 2019. The Border: Policy and Politics in Europe and the United States

Book review. Review work: The Border: Policy and Politics in Europe and the United States / Martin A. Schain, Martin A. - Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019. 299 pp.Professor of Politics Emeritus at New York University, Martin A Schain, shows in The Border: Policy and Politics in Europe and the United States that border and migration management in the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (US) are not as different as we might think. He illustrates similarities in the attempts to curb undocumented migration and simultaneous efforts to attract labour force. The period of the book spans from the 1990s to 2017-2018, depending on the topic. It provides an outline of border management and migration in Europe and the US, with plenty or numerical data and overview of legal and political changes in approaches to migration.Non peer reviewe

Who should benefit from free movement? A comparative study on British and Romanian political discourses in the pre-Brexit period

The right to free movement in the European Union is currently an extremely topical matter, accentuated by the Brexit referendum, and its eventual impacts on the free movement regime. In this article, I analyse how the British Prime Ministers and the Home Secretaries as well as the Romanian Presidents and the Prime Ministers between January 2005 and January 2015 discussed the right to free movement in terms of the benefits and costs it incurs. British statements were collected from the government and party websites, and Romanian statements were collected from the official website of the President of Romania, from the Prime Minister’s website as well from the archives of the Romanian government. The analysis reveals that the right to free movement was discussed in the British and the Romanian contexts mainly in connection with social security and brain drain, respectively. The article is divided in two parts, first of which considers theoretical and methodological questions, and the second discusses utility-related utterances about free movement in their political contexts. Finally, I draw my conclusions relying on the sections concerning utility-based questions related to free movement in the British and the Romanian discourses. I argue that the British approach relied on the view that only UK citizens should be entitled to social benefits. Romanian politicians, in turn, balanced between brain drain and benefits for individual citizens. Despite the seemingly different approaches, both perspectives were informed by the view that free movement should benefit societies, or rather, that people should not be a strain on the society. Both also represented free movement as a zero-sum game where one’s gain is another’s loss, and surprisingly, the national economy in both countries was presented as losing in the game.</p

Vaikutusvaltaa hakemassa: Suomen ja Ruotsin poliittiset diskurssit EU:n puolustusyhteistyöstä 2016–2019

The article discusses how Swedish and Finnish politicians discuss deepening defence cooperation in the European Union, in particular the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) in defence. The empirical material consists of political documents and parliamentary debates from 2016 to 2019 and includes white papers, reports, parliamentary debates, government proposals and letters concerning Permanent Structured Cooperation. The analytical tool utilized in the articles is based on Europeanization theory and its concepts of national projection, national adaptation and identity reconstruction. The Finnish and Swedish politicians justify the participation in PESCO by referring to influence: Finnish politicians depict PESCO as based on a partly Finnish initiative of strengthening defence cooperation. Those (few) opposing PESCO, in turn, utilize different levels of discourse: the Finnish opponents describes PESCO as part of federalist development, whereas the Swedish criticism regard the potential disruption of the Swedish military non-alignment as a threat. The policies of the countries, however, remain similar.Artikkelissa kuvataan, kuinka Suomessa ja Ruotsissa ilmaistut poliittiset perusteet osallistua EU:n pysyvään rakenteelliseen yhteistyöhön (PRY) pohjautuvat kansalliseen vaikutusvaltaan. Empiirinen aineisto koostuu poliittisista asiakirjoista ja täysistuntokeskusteluista vuosina 2016–2019. Analyyttisenä apuvälineenä artikkelissa käytetään eurooppalaistumisteorian käsitteitä kansallisesta vaikuttamisesta, mukautumisesta ja identiteetin uudelleenrakentumisesta. Suomessa hallitus esittää PRY:n pohjautuvan Suomen osaltaan alullepanemaan yhteistyöhön ja Ruotsissa taas halutaan päästä vaikuttamaan yhteistyöhön alusta pitäen. Yhteistyöhön osallistumisen (harvalukuiset) vastustajat puolestaan käyttävät erilaisia keskustelun tasoja: Suomessa kriitikot ovat esittäneet PRY:n olevan osa liittovaltiokehitystä, ja Ruotsissa uhkana on nähty maan sotilaallisen liittoutumattomuuden rapautuminen. Varsinaisen politiikan sisällössä mailla ei diskurssieroista huolimatta ole kuitenkaan huomattavia eroavaisuuksia, vaan molemmat maat osallistuvat PRY-projekteihin aktiivisesti

Morals and the right to free movement - Insiders, outsiders and Europe’s migration crisis

This article examines the right to free movement in the European Union (EU) and discusses the moral questions related to refugees in light of the current migration context. More specifically, in this article, I discuss the right to free movement in terms of its development into an EU citizenship right and assess the grounds for its validity. I argue that free movement was developed in a manner that puts too much emphasis on external threats coming from outside the EU borders. I also claim that the right to free movement is an exclusive concept that adds to the alienation between EU-citizens and the rest, which is also visible in the ongoing so-called migration crisis.Keywords</p

Propagandaa Saamenmaalta : visuaalinen monikielisyys Suohpanterror- taidekollektiivin teoksissa

Peer reviewe

The privilege of free movement : Discursive representations of mobility in Finnish upper secondary level EU textbooks

This article examines how free movement and mobility are represented in Finnish upper secondary level EU textbooks. There were three such books in use at the time of writing, published in 2007, 2010 and 2014. My methodology is based on the discourse-historical approach outlined by Ruth Wodak, focusing particularly on the various discursive strategies present in the books. I have divided the groups addressed into four levels of mobility thus; ‘EU movers’, ‘restricted EU movers’, ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’. The EU movers were the most positively viewed group; their mobility was often related to work and studies. ‘Restricted EU movers’ refers to citizens of the countries that joined the EU in the twenty-first century, whose ‘invasion’ was allegedly feared by the older member states. Migrants outside the EU were described, inter alia, as a ‘flow of millions of poor people’ eager to enter Europe. Refugees, in turn, were conflated with people applying for asylum with- out valid grounds, creating a ‘refugee flow’ dealing with which member states needed to assist each other. Overall, this article concurs with the findings of previous studies: school books tend to present those moving within Europe as more agreeable, with less acceptable stereotypical characteristics being attached to extra-EU migrants and minority groups such as the Roma.Peer reviewe

Framing of the new CSDP in militarily non-aligned Finland and Sweden : Promotion of national interests or a step towards a European security community?

Peer reviewe

Britain and the Other – Moral perceptions of the right to free movement in the European Commission and in the UK

As a result of the enlargement of the European Union (EU), the number of migrants from Eastern and Central European countries has expanded in the &ldquo;old&rdquo; Member States, after which some politicians and political parties have started to question the rationale of free movement. This article tackles this topical subject by analysing the moral aspects of the right to free movement, which is a fundamental right in the European Union. A new framework for analysing moral stances will be introduced, which makes it possible to analyze moral perspectives on a broader scale instead of focusing on single juxtapositions. As an illustrative example of the use of the framework, the attitudes toward free movement of three European Commissioners and United Kingdom (UK) Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and David Cameron will be presented in the timescale of 2007 to 2014. The UK did not establish any transitional restrictions for the new EU Member States that joined in 2004, but the number of migrants was larger than expected. Recently, Prime Minister David Cameron has presented measures to decrease the number of EU migrants. It will be argued that free movement is consistently justified by the Commissioners, while the British rhetoric is based more on the &ldquo;us/them-division&rdquo;.</p