Mobile Welfare in a Transnational Europe: An Analysis of Portability Regimes of Social Security Rights
Final Report Abstract
The aim of the TRANSWEL project was to disentangle the nexus between intra-EU migration/mobility and welfare in the enlarged European Union. Focusing on transnational labour movements within four pairs of countries (Hungary–Austria, Bulgaria–Germany, Estonia–Sweden and Poland–United Kingdom), it provided a comparative analysis of the formal organization and individuals’ use of European social coordination, which involves mobile Europeans’ access to social security rights and the portability of these rights from the sending to the receiving countries (and back) in the areas of unemployment, family benefits, health insurance and pensions. The project contributes to the study of intra-EU mobility, welfare and European social citizenship through a comparative examination of regulations, discourses and mobile Europeans’ experiences of cross-border social security and social rights portability. It offers insights into the selectivity criteria of welfare provision in the four above-mentioned social security areas that lie at the heart of European cross-border social security governance. In addition, it identifies specific discourses of welfare belonging (gendered, ethnicized/racialized, class-related images of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’) that frame institutional selectivity by constructing images of mobile EU-citizens who either do or do not ‘deserve’ social membership. The project also provides a detailed examination of inequalities that mobile EU citizens from the new EU countries experience when trying to access and port social security rights across borders and reveals how these experiences are linked to the institutional selectivity criteria of European cross-border social security governance. Projects’ main outcome is that the institutional requirements of formal employment and long-term residence are the main selectivity criteria of European social security governance that generate the unequal welfare opportunities among mobile EU citizens. These welfare inequalities are framed by powerful discourses of welfare belonging with regard to largely non-desired Eastern European movers from the peripheries of the EU, only the self-sufficient of whom are regarded in a positive light. Most important, mobile EU citizens experience free movement as a vicious cycle of losses of welfare opportunities that result from individual decisions not to claim rights because of the barriers experienced and from perceptions of not being treated the same way as immobile welfare claimants.
Publications
- ‘Damn It, I Am a Miserable Eastern European in the Eyes of the Administrator’. EU migrants’ experiences with (transnational) social security. Social Inclusion. 6 (3). 2018
Scheibelhofer, E. and Holzinger, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v6i3.1477) - Boundaries of European Social Citizenship: Regulations, Discourses and Experiences of Transnational Social Security . Routledge. 2019
Amelina, A., Carmel, E., Runfors, A. and E. Scheibelhofer
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429285318)
