Internal Fortress: Regulating European Freedom of Movement within the Nation-State, 1950-1980

Informations projet

InternalFortress

N° de convention de subvention: 101116211

DOI

10.3030/101116211

Date de signature de la CE 18 Septembre 2023

Date de début 1 Janvier 2024

Date de fin 31 Decembre 2028

Financé au titre de

• European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 1 426 851,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 426 851,00

Coordonné par

NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - InternalFortress (Internal Fortress: Regulating European Freedom of Movement within the Nation-State, 1950-1980)

Période du rapport: 2024-01-01 au 2026-06-30

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

The free of movement of people is widely seen as one of the cornerstones of European integration. It allows citizens from member states to live and work across borders and is often celebrated as a symbol of a borderless Europe. Yet this freedom has always depended on complex systems of regulation. Workers moving across borders require access to social security, training, housing, and family rights. To deliver these services, national authorities must coordinate with European institutions, employers, trade unions, and welfare organizations. Internal Fortress examines how European freedom of movement was regulated within nation-states between 1950 and 1980. The project asks a fundamental question: did European integration weaken national control over migration, or did it instead reshape and in some cases even strengthen national regulatory systems?

The decades after the Second World War were a formative period. Countries in Western Europe shifted towards a new model of mass immigration, while at the same time rebuilding war-torn economies and expanding welfare. Thus, the rules governing free movement in the European Economic Community (EEC) intersected with a complex range of social and economic priorities in the member states. Governments had to reconcile broad mobility rights with national and local efforts to build up social services and promote full employment, while also balancing migration relationships with states outside the EEC, including many former colonies.

The project uses a mix of public and private archival sources drawn from local, national, and international bodies to understand how this process unfolded in practice. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates about migration governance, the postwar welfare state, and European integration. The project explores how European free movement helped to introduce a more decentralized - and often more conflictual - mode of migration politics. The expected impact is twofold. First, the project helps shift the focus of academic research from the negotiation of formal European rules in Brussels to their practical implementation. Secondly, it provides a valuable reference point for people who are currently active in migration policy, by revealing how today’s broad norms of regional mobility have been constructed over time through a diffuse process organizational tinkering, often far from the border.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

The members of the project have conducted extensive research in the archives of European institutions, national governments, and local organizations that are involved in labor, welfare, and migration policy. A central achievement has been to trace the dense organizational networks that supported the implementation of free movement. These networks linked European institutions to ministries, trade unions, welfare organizations, religious charities, and migrant associations. The research shows that free movement required continuous coordination and administrative innovation across multiple levels of governance. Moreover, this was far from a seamless process: it left many gaps and many areas of unresolved tension.

Comparative case studies in France and Germany have examined how freedom of movement interacted with vocational training systems, labor markets, and migrant entrepreneurship. This work demonstrates how European rules were adapted to different national contexts and how migrants navigated emerging systems of rights and obligations.

The project has also developed an innovative methodological approach. By combining comparative history, multi-level institutional analysis, and systematic use of non-governmental archives, it reconstructs how regulation was enacted in practice. This approach allows the project to connect high-level European policy with local organizational dynamics, in areas such as social security, training, and family reunification. Taken together, the research team has assembled a substantial body of primary material and produced new interpretations of how mobility rights were institutionalized in postwar Europe.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

The project advances the state of the art in several ways. First, it challenges the common assumption that European integration weakened national sovereignty over migration. The findings suggest, rather, that free movement entailed a shift in the emphasis of national migration policy from admission at the border towards social integration and family welfare behind the border. This required new administrative capacity at the local level to insert mobile workers into welfare and labor-market systems.

Second, the project highlights the influence that non-governmental actors exerted over this process. Indeed, the administrative authority to implement European norms was often shared in unstable ways between public and private bodies. Trade unions, companies, welfare organizations, and migrant aid networks often claimed a central role in the practical functioning of mobility rights. By highlighting this dynamic, the project moves beyond formal diplomatic accounts of European integration.

Third, the research team has developed an innovative multi-level perspective, showing how regulatory authority passed between international organizations, European institutions, national administrations, and local service providers. This framework offers tools that can be applied to other areas of transnational governance beyond migration.

The project’s results have potential long-term impact for both scholarship and policy. For researchers, they open new avenues for studying the interaction between migration, welfare systems, and regional integration. For those active in migration policy today, they demonstrate the extent to which European free movement came to depend on coordination between public and private actors at different levels, while also highlighting the novel political tensions that emerged from this model. By showing how past efforts to manage mobility shaped today’s institutional landscape, Internal Fortress contributes to a deeper understanding of one of the most contested areas of European politics.